Part of the reason I wanted to do this mini-series of posts is because I have myself put out an e-book, available through amazon for kindle or kindle-compatible readers. It’s called The Bridge That Buñuel Built.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why I have brought this book out at this particular time. Maybe just because I can. The whole thing is an experiment for me. Conventional wisdom from publishers is that you can’t sell short story collections, so I was fairly sure there wouldn’t be any interest in it from them. (I didn’t try.) The stories in the collection are themselves experiments. So it seemed right to publish this collection of experimental oddities in this experimental form. This is from my introduction:

“I don’t write short stories.” That’s what I tell people. And yet, somehow, here is a collection of short stories with my name on them.

Have I been lying all these years? I prefer to say I’ve been in denial. But why? My only excuse is the notorious difficulty of the short story form. To say I write short stories has always seemed too big a claim. Modesty forbids, and all that.

I don’t write short stories. I try things out, experiment, have a go. Take an idea and run with it. These are the results, sometimes playful, occasionally bizarre, invariably flawed.

The title story is a case in point. There was a Buñuel season on the TV at the time. I recorded several of the films and watched them back to back, Belle de Jour, followed by The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, followed by That Obscure Object of Desire. To be exposed to so much surrealism all at once obviously had an effect on me. It also coincided with a time in my life when my daily walk to the office took me past a sandwich bar called ‘Brunel’s’. It was named, I presumed, after the great civil engineer of the nineteenth century, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer amongst other things of the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Now I have no idea why a sandwich bar had been named after an engineer. Perhaps Brunel had once been commissioned to create a new sandwich, having been confused with a chef of a similar name? I could only conjecture. As I pondered the mystery of that, I wondered whether a comparable confusion, in a parallel universe, might somehow have occurred between Brunel and Buñuel, whose names struck me as uncannily connected.

I must have been thinking a lot about Buñuel at the time, because every day I walked past the sandwich bar this thought occurred to me. I found that the only way I could release myself from this strange preoccupation was to write a story about it.

Whether this is the best way to go about writing a short story, I have no idea. But then again, I don’t write short stories.

Some stories in this collection have been published before. The bridge that Buñuel built first saw light on the Bloomsbury website; The Symptoms of his madness were as follows: originally appeared in Metropolitan magazine and subsequently in Abraxas; The Devil’s drum cropped up in Darkness Rising, Volume One and was turned into a one act opera by the composer Ed Hughes; Revenants won a competition run by Warpton Comics and so was published as a comic book with illustrations by Simon Mobbs; Stockshot City was published in Abraxas Unbound.

Adventures in e-Publishing Part One.

Adventures in e-Publishing Part Two.

Adventures in e-Publishing Part Three.

Adventures in e-Publishing Part Four.

Start reading The Bridge That Buñuel Built now!

KATE LYALL GRANT

There’s no doubt the advent of e-publishing has shaken things up in the publishing industry. I used an analogy in my interview with Lee Jackson, of conventional publishers being a bit like sail-makers in the age of steam. Playing devil’s advocate, you understand! Of course, people still buy sail boats. But it’s a tiny market and they’re all millionaires or men going through the mid-life crisis. Is this the future for print books? Are conventional publishers worried? Should they be?

This is obviously a time of huge innovation and change within the publishing industry – and I think it’s up to publishers to make the most of the new opportunities available, rather than worry about and shy away from the changed technological landscape. These are certainly exciting and interesting times to be working in publishing: e-books and everything that goes with them have the potential to bring enormous benefits as well as challenges for conventional publishers, who must be ready to adapt, embracing the opportunities to reach new readers while not losing sight of their regular, longstanding customers and core market.  There are still a great many people (like me) who prefer to read print books and I think they will be safe for the next generation at least.  After that, who knows?  Yes, there’s no question that e-books do detract from print sales but, for the next few years at least, it’s a finite market.  There is endless discussion within the publishing industry at the moment as to the future of the e-book, but the truth is that no one has the definitive answer at this stage.

I think I’m right in saying that you publish all Severn House books as e-books as well as in hardback and paperback editions. How significant a part of the business are e-book sales?

The Severn House e-book list was launched in June last year, so it’s still very early days for us to ascertain sales patterns etc.  As an independent hardcover publisher, our core business remains the libraries and we have no intention of neglecting our key customers who are the wholesalers and library suppliers.  Having said that, e-books is where we see our growth area in years to come and we are planning for a future where e-books will eventually make up the majority of our revenue.  The great thing is that, for the first time, e-books enable a small publishing company like us to compete on a level playing field with the big publishing houses – and I’m looking forward to doing exactly that!

Should e-books offer extra material that isn’t in the print edition? The i-Pad, for example, gives you the opportunity to put in video clips, snatches of music, an audio clip or two (the message left of the victim’s answerphone, that haunting melody that conjures up the past)… Is this all a distraction? Or do publishers need to become purveyors of multi-media entertainment?

Personally I would find the inclusion of extra material such as video clips, snatches of music etc an irritating distraction, preferring to give my imagination full flow to do the job. To me, it’s infantilising the reader – but I recognise I’m probably something of an old fogey in that respect and in years to come publishers will have adapted to cater for the tastes of new generations of readers who’ve been brought up from the outset to expect this kind of additional material.

Do you own a kindle, or an e-reader of any kind? If so, how do you use it?

I own a Sony e-reader onto which I download all manuscript submissions.  In that respect it’s made my job as an editor so much easier and it’s hard now to remember the days when my shoulder used to ache constantly, weighed down with a satchel full of hard-copy manuscripts to and from the office.  However, I much prefer to read print books than e-books: during my leisure hours, I really don’t feel like reading words on a e-screen having spent all day in front of a computer.  I suppose it’s how I differentiate my ‘pleasure reading’ from my ‘work reading’ (although the two are by no means mutually exclusive of course!).

Many writers are rushing to self-publish. Does this just reduce the slush-pile, or does it mean that a canny editor is now scouring self-published books in the hope of discovering a gem they can take to the next stage? Is everyone looking for the next Amanda Hocking?

There is so much self-published material out there, an over-burdened commissioning editor just doesn’t have the time to wade through the acres of chaff to get to the kernel of wheat.  For every Amanda Hocking, there are at least 10,000 also-rans, I suspect.  For this reason, mainstream publishers will generally only accept submissions via literary agents.  But yes, if a self-published e-book has sold upwards of 30,000 copies and is attracting rave reviews from readers, then it will attract attention from editors and should certainly be worth taking a look at.  Does it reduce the slush pile?  No, I don’t think so.  Every unpublished first-time writer I’ve worked with in my capacity as a freelance editor dreams of being in print – being published online simply doesn’t have the same cachet.

Does online piracy concern you? If so, what can we do about it? How do you persuade people that it’s worth paying for e-books?

Online piracy is a potential problem. I would never send out a PDF file of a manuscript to a potential reviewer or customer, for example, without ensuring that it’s pre-secured, so it can only be downloaded by the recipient themselves. Apart from general vigilance however, it’s hard to know what else we can do at this end apart from doing our bit to drive the lesson home to the reading public at every given opportunity that £5.99 (or whatever) is really not such a huge price to pay for a good book, into which a huge amount of time and effort has been invested by the author and all those who work with them – and that it is ultimately the reader who will lose out if authors find they can no longer afford to write for a living financially, and the quantity and quality of books available will therefore suffer.

Following on from the last question, what is a fair price for an e-book?

What is a fair price for an e-book?  Again, a subject of intense debate amongst publishers and retailers at the moment.  Personally, I loathe seeing e-books available at 99p or thereabouts: I think it devalues books as a commodity and takes no account of the fact that this is the product of, on average, a year’s work on the part of the author.  On the other hand, it’s better to be read than not read, and yes, there is certainly a case for making long out-of-print backlist titles available at a low price.  As far as new books are concerned, however, I personally wouldn’t want to see any priced lower than, say, £4.99 – and ideally rather higher than that.  But doubtless market forces will dictate.

Is the e-book changing the relationship between the author and the publisher?

Not in my experience, no – and I don’t see any reason why it should.  As publishers, our role is to make an author’s work as attractive or enticing as we can, then make it available and bring it to the attention of as many potential readers/customers as possible (budgetary constraints permitting!). E-rights are now an integral part of any mainstream publishing contract, and the e-book is simply another format in which publishers can make an author’s work available.

Who will be the winners and who the losers as e-books develop?

As long as e-books aren’t priced too ridiculously cheaply, as long as there’s healthy competition among online retailers (both of which are big ‘if’s), then I think publishers, authors, retailers and, not least, readers should all benefit from the e-book revolution.  The losers unfortunately – unless they can find a way to sell e-books effectively – will be the traditional bookshop chains – although there should still be room for independents, where the customer can benefit from the individual bookseller’s expertise and personal recommendations.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part One here.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part Two here.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part Three here.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part Five here.

questions   X Inbox X           rogernmorris Hi Kate, there are some questions attached. Feel free to ignore any that you … 31 Jan (1 day ago) Reply Kate Lyall Grant to rogernmorris show details 31 Jan (1 day ago) Hi Roger, Not at all.  Responses below – please feel free to use as you wish: 1)    This is obviously a time of huge innovation and change within the publishing industry – and I think it’s up to publishers to make the most of the new opportunities available, rather than worry about and shy away from the changed technological landscape. These are certainly exciting and interesting times to be working in publishing: e-books and everything that goes with them have the potential to bring enormous benefits as well as challenges for conventional publishers, who must be ready to adapt, embracing the opportunities to reach new readers while not losing sight of their regular, longstanding customers and core market.  There are still a great many people (like me) who prefer to read print books and I think they will be safe for the next generation at least.  After that, who knows?  Yes, there’s no question that e-books do detract from print sales but, for the next few years at least, it’s a finite market.  There is endless discussion within the publishing industry at the moment as to the future of the e-book, but the truth is that no one has the definitive answer at this stage. 2)    The Severn House e-book list was launched in June last year, so it’s still very early days for us to ascertain sales patterns etc.  As an independent hardcover publisher, our core business remains the libraries and we have no intention of neglecting our key customers who are the wholesalers and library suppliers.  Having said that, e-books is where we see our growth area in years to come and we are planning for a future where e-books will eventually make up the majority of our revenue.  The great thing is that, for the first time, e-books enable a small publishing company like us to compete on a level playing field with the big publishing houses – and I’m looking forward to doing exactly that! 3)    Personally I would find the inclusion of extra material such as video clips, snatches of music etc an irritating distraction, preferring to give my imagination full flow to do the job. To me, it’s infantilising the reader – but I recognise I’m probably something of an old fogey in that respect and in years to come publishers will have adapted to cater for the tastes of new generations of readers who’ve been brought up from the outset to expect this kind of additional material. 4)    I own a Sony e-reader onto which I download all manuscript submissions.  In that respect it’s made my job as an editor so much easier and it’s hard now to remember the days when my shoulder used to ache constantly, weighed down with a satchel full of hard-copy manuscripts to and from the office.  However, I much prefer to read print books than e-books: during my leisure hours, I really don’t feel like reading words on a e-screen having spent all day in front of a computer.  I suppose it’s how I differentiate my ‘pleasure reading’ from my ‘work reading’ (although the two are by no means mutually exclusive of course!). 5)    There is so much self-published material out there, an over-burdened commissioning editor just doesn’t have the time to wade through the acres of chaff to get to the kernel of wheat.  For every Amanda Hocking, there are at least 10,000 also-rans, I suspect.  For this reason, mainstream publishers will generally only accept submissions via literary agents.  But yes, if a self-published e-book has sold upwards of 30,000 copies and is attracting rave reviews from readers, then it will attract attention from editors and should certainly be worth taking a look at.  Does it reduce the slush pile?  No, I don’t think so.  Every unpublished first-time writer I’ve worked with in my capacity as a freelance editor dreams of being in print – being published online simply doesn’t have the same cachet. 6)    Online piracy is a potential problem. I would never send out a PDF file of a manuscript to a potential reviewer or customer, for example, without ensuring that it’s pre-secured, so it can only be downloaded by the recipient themselves. Apart from general vigilance however, it’s hard to know what else we can do at this end apart from doing our bit to drive the lesson home to the reading public at every given opportunity that £5.99 (or whatever) is really not such a huge price to pay for a good book, into which a huge amount of time and effort has been invested by the author and all those who work with them – and that it is ultimately the reader who will lose out if authors find they can no longer afford to write for a living financially, and the quantity and quality of books available will therefore suffer. 7)      What is a fair price for an e-book?  Again, a subject of intense debate amongst publishers and retailers at the moment.  Personally, I loathe seeing e-books available at 99p or thereabouts: I think it devalues books as a commodity and takes no account of the fact that this is the product of, on average, a year’s work on the part of the author.  On the other hand, it’s better to be read than not read, and yes, there is certainly a case for making long out-of-print backlist titles available at a low price.  As far as new books are concerned, however, I personally wouldn’t want to see any priced lower than, say, £4.99 – and ideally rather higher than that.  But doubtless market forces will dictate. 8)    Not in my experience, no – and I don’t see any reason why it should.  As publishers, our role is to make an author’s work as attractive or enticing as we can, then make it available and bring it to the attention of as many potential readers/customers as possible (budgetary constraints permitting!). E-rights are now an integral part of any mainstream publishing contract, and the e-book is simply another format in which publishers can make an author’s work available. 9)    As long as e-books aren’t priced too ridiculously cheaply, as long as there’s healthy competition among online retailers (both of which are big ‘if’s), then I think publishers, authors, retailers and, not least, readers should all benefit from the e-book revolution.  The losers unfortunately – unless they can find a way to sell e-books effectively – will be the traditional bookshop chains – although there should still be room for independents, where the customer can benefit from the individual bookseller’s expertise and personal recommendations. Hope that all makes sense and is what’s required.  Do let me know if you need any further info. All best, Kate From: rachelyarham@blueyonder.co.uk [mailto:rachelyarham@blueyonder.co.uk] On Behalf Of rogernmorris Sent: 31 January 2012 10:44 To: Kate Lyall Grant Subject: questions - Show quoted text - ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service. For more information please visit http://www.symanteccloud.com ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service. For more information please visit http://www.symanteccloud.com ______________________________________________________________________ Reply Forward Reply rogernmorris to Kate show details 31 Jan (1 day ago) That’s fantastic Kate. Thanks so much. You make some great points.   Is there a brief bio anywhere that I can steal? A mug shot would be great too! Roger - Show quoted text - – www.rogernmorris.co.uk http://cargocollective.com/rogermorriscopy/   Reply Forward

Just to get this out of the way, any relation to Amanda Hocking?

Yes, we’ve been happily married for years. No – wait! We’re completely unconnected.

So congratulations on those sales, Ian. The last time I looked, Déjà Vu was number 6 in the amazon.co.uk technothriller ranking – for all book formats, not just kindle. That’s quite an achievement. To what do you owe your success?

Like most authors, I only have clues but no definitive answer. Déjà Vu itself was first published in 2005 by the UKA Press. There, it was edited by the talented Aliya Whitely. The UKA Press angle didn’t work for a variety of reasons. Meantime, I kept working on the book. I genuinely thought it was good – or, at least, that it was the kind of book I wanted to read. The next step was a near-miss from a larger publisher. I picked up literary representation on the back of this. Along the way, I recorded Déjà Vu as a podcast, and kept reworking the material. Eventually, when my agent couldn’t place the book, I gave up writing. There’s a post on my blog about it. I redrafted Déjà Vu again in line with a short report from Scott Pack, hired Clare Christian to give it a proper edit, and put it out for the Kindle. What I’m saying, in a roundabout way, is that I never tired of returning to the story of Déjà Vu and polishing it. Those years in the wilderness paid off in terms of the quality of the book. I don’t know how it compares to other publications out there, but it has certainly received more attention than most, both from the writer and its editors.

Déjà Vu was originally published as a paperback by Bluechrome publishing, to considerable acclaim, including a rave review in the Guardian. Why did you decide to bring out your own e-edition? How does self-publishing compare to being published by a small press?

It depends on the small press. My experience with UKA Press (which was bankrolled by Bluechrome at the time) was not, on the whole, a good one. I welcomed the opportunity to be fully in control of the process. Frankly, when an author is published by a small press (and maybe by a big press), the marketing work falls to him or her anyway, so there is little difference on that score. But the main thrust of the thinking behind self publication was to get the thing off my hard drive and ‘park’ it somewhere for posterity. I honestly, truly, thought nobody beyond my immediate friends and family would buy it. Publication via the Kindle is a dream come true. Putting aside for a moment the implications of Amazon for the publishing industry, a Kindle author has: monthly royalty payments; instant access to sales; a global distribution mechanism that costs nothing at the point of signing up; and the ability to make any and all corrections they see fit to the manuscript, continuously. Amazon has transformed publishing, but, more than that, it has provided a framework for books to find success based on their quality – and this is something new.

I believe Déjà Vu has also recently was a winner in the 2011 Red Adept Reviews Indie Award for Science Fiction. Congratulations again. Not only that, it has 67 reviews on amazon.co.uk. 67! So how do you go about getting reviews and how do you make sure they’re positive? (Apart from writing a brilliant book, of course!)

Imagine me flapping a hand at the computer and making an ‘Aw, shucks,’ face.

The review system is one of my favourite parts of Amazon. It provides a representative sample of responses from customers. That statement sounds banal until you consider that, for much of the history of traditional publishing, responses to books have been non-representative (i.e. professional critics, whose reading responses are often artificial), rarely from customers, and few in number.

I’ve set up a saved search for my name on Twitter. If I see that a person has tweeted about reading my book, I’ll send them a polite reply asking them to put a review on the Kindle store. More than a quarter of the reviews on the Kindle store are from people I’ve contacted. Otherwise, I always reply to emails that readers send me. It freaks them out; but I take their emails seriously. I don’t reply with canned responses, or ultra-short sentences that imply I’ve got better things to do than respond to fan mail. If I were to look at this coldly – which I don’t – I could say that I’m building personal relationships with customers and improving the odds that they’ll remember me and buy my books in future. But it’s just cool to get feedback. I’m interested in what people have to say.

Nicholas Clee, in that New Statesman article, suggested that, impressive as your sales are, you could have made more if you’d published by the conventional route. How do you answer that?

Yes, there’s a lengthy reply to Nicholas on my blog. He’s probably right. But the point is that I am one of the new guard: I make little money, but consistently, at one end of the tail. The Kindle publishing model suits people like me. I have a full time job as a researcher and lecturer, which I love, and I can write part time and earn money to invest in editing and covers.

If you’re doing so well pursuing the self-publishing route, why do you need a big-shot American agent? I hear you’ve recently been taken on by one.

At heart, it comes down to thinking one or two moves ahead. I will be forever grateful to Amazon for giving me the opportunity to reach people with my fiction. Nobody else wanted to do that. But I’m not sentimentally attached to the idea of ebooks. I’m into extended prose, whatever form it comes in, because I want people to read my work.

A few weeks ago I spoke to a very nice man who is the commissioning editor for a large UK publisher. He told me he thought Déjà Vu was great, but given that I’d already sold 11,000 units of Déjà Vu and Flashback combined, there was no market for them. I scratched my head for a minute or two. Then I went to the website of my email-buddy Gerard Jones, Everyone Who’s Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing, Newspapers, Magazines, Broadcasting and Tinseltown, Too, and looked up the contact details of some American agents.

I approached them with my reviews and sales data. Did they think the UK market could serve as a test case for how well the book might do in the US? More of them agreed, and more enthusiastically, than I had anticipated. Several phone calls later, I’m proud to say that I’m represented by Katherine Flynn at Kneerim & Williams. She’s brilliant and I’m genuinely looking forward to working with her.

What’s their view on your self-publishing endeavours? There was a time when this might have counted against an author. Has that changed?

Self-publishing once involved a considerable investment. Now, because it is trivially easy to publish via the Kindle, the number of people uploading their books makes for a larger group. It’s no longer a niche and more difficult for those within conventional publishing to stigmatise. There’s a recognition, I think, that it is a legitimate route for a writer who has not been able to secure a traditional deal.

And it was ever true that nothing succeeds like success. A few years back, G. P. Taylor was viewed as a self-publishing hero because he sold so many copies of his fantasy series. If he hadn’t, maybe people would see him as a sad bastard. Self-publishing success shows that people want to buy your work. That addresses the anxiety of most publishers.

You famously announced on your blog that you’ve given up writing fiction. Still the case?

No, I’m writing again. However, I’ve never made a decision that made me more relaxed, normal and relieved in the short term. I could spend more time reading, playing my guitar and piano, and getting more involved in life. Then my books became successful. I’m back to daydreaming and filing away the horrors of the everyday into drawers marked ‘Useful’. I’m sweating over metaphors. And happy.

You’re a man who’s looked into the future. Is conventional publishing dead? And if so, should we be sorry?

Conventional publishing is going to shrink further than it has already. Physical books will become rare because their technology is not as conducive to fiction as electronic readers. However, there is still a role for middlemen to play. I want to write; I don’t want to be hand-coding the paragraphs, booking adverts, or hiring proofreaders.

Any advice for anyone foolish enough to dip a toe into the self-publishing waters (me, for instance)? What are the pitfalls?

Advice: Do it. Remember that there is a correlation, for all books, between quality and sales, but your own book might be an outlier. Load the dice in your favour by making the text as good as possible. Usually, that means hiring people to take care of all the stages of editing. The cover needs to be great. You, Roger, already have a goddamn great cover. The price needs to be low. If you picture your own book against an established author in the same genre, ask yourself why a person is going to spend money on you. Price is a huge factor in that. I have a lot of feedback from readers who say that my book was so cheap they figured what the hell. Then they wrote a nice review; told their friends; and bought the next in the series at a higher price. I wouldn’t benefit from that if I hadn’t hooked them with something from the beginning.

I’m struggling to think of pitfalls. It is possible that you’ll spend money on editing, on the cover, and make no money back. But this can only be a few hundred quid. That’s not loose change, by any means, but remember that Amazon (or whoever) has sunk many of the distribution costs already. This won’t be like self-publishing was ten years ago. And isn’t your book worth the money? It probably is. It can be an ebook for a very long time indeed.

Adventures in e-publishing Part One.

Adventures in e-publishing Part Two.

Adventures in e-publishing Part Four.

Adventures in e-Publishing Part Five here.

Ian Hocking blogs here.

What first made you decide to become an e-publishing magnate?

Magnate? The canny reader may surmise that Roger is flattering me here; but he will still not receive a discount on his next purchase. I should also point out that, at the moment, I’m just publishing via Amazon – not via Kobo, Sony, Apple or elsewhere.

I’ve always been fascinated by the possibilities of publishing historical material on the web. I’ve been using the internet since 1993 (when it still looked like this) and I’ve been digitising material for my own site for the last ten years. That, of course, was gratis – but the rise of Amazon, Kindle and Twitter seemed to offer a new model for self-publishing.

Also, I really needed the money.

You’re pretty savvy when it comes to all things computer-related. Presumably this helps? Do you think it enabled you to see the potential of e-books before other people did?

I don’t think I’m especially ahead of the curve, although it’s very hard to judge. As a ‘publisher’ I’ve sold (at a low price) about 25,000 ebooks this last eight months, which is probably quite good – but I have very little to compare it with.

As for the potential of ebooks, the fact that my dad loves his new Kindle – he’s a serious reader, vaguely open to technology, but still not master of things like, erm, ‘cut and paste’ – well, that tells me a lot. I do think people have been very very slow to appreciate what a well-designed product Amazon has produced, dazzled by all the slick marketing and style of iPads et al. The Kindle is functional, light-weight, pretty intuitive to use, cheap; and, of course, coupled with Amazon’s superb infrastructure for selling. I don’t know the Sony and Kobo readers – and I’m not even particularly familiar with things Apple – but I think the Kindle is a lovely, unassuming, work-horse – which is exactly what the dedicated reader of books wants.

I am not sponsored by Amazon. Although I will accept any offer.

Your approach to e-publishing is slightly different to other writers. Although you’ve published one of your own novels, most of the books you’ve published are by dead writers. Where or how do you find the books on the Victorian London list? What are you looking for in a typical Victorian London publication?

The ideal book is one that most people haven’t heard of before; and one that explores obscure, unusual, fascinating aspects of Victorian London life. The first book I published on Kindle, for example, was The Hooligan Nights – a ‘true story’ of sorts, written in the late 1890s, about teen street gangs in Lambeth. It’s an amazing read and I suspect many of its readers will have been astonished by its treatment of crime, the glimpses of street culture, and the marvellous anti-hero – young ‘Alf’ – a ‘hoodie’ of the period. There is so much more to Victorian London than Dickens or Sherlock Holmes – that’s what I’m after – the bits we have missed.

Before you can publish them, you have to scan them in page by page. Isn’t that rather laborious? Or weirdly therapeutic? Or perhaps you have child labourers to do that work for you, in the spirit of Victorian London?

Yes, the majority of things I’ve published have been scanned by the Optical Character Recognition Urchins who sleep in the coal shed. Gruel, as an incentive, is much underestimated by modern publishers. This is where I have the edge.

Actually, my camera now does most of the image capture side; it’s much quicker than my old scanner.

Are you surprised at the success of Victorian London books? And what do you put it down to?

The success is amazing. The best-seller Daily Life in Victorian London – an anthology of my favourite Victoriana – accounts for about 2/3 of sales, and then there’s a sliding scale for the rest (I’ve published nine books so far – many more to come this year). In part, I’ve done well because ‘Daily Life’ is – dare I say it – simply a great read. But I’ve also been astonished by the sales of London and Londoners in the 1850s and 1860s – a truly excellent memoir of daily life by, erm, a distinguished Victorian electrical engineer. Equally, by the relative lack of sales for a couple of the other titles. What makes a particular title do well – I’ve no real idea. I think that’s something I have in common with most people involved in publishing, mind you.

Twitter is definitely a factor – without any other ‘marketing’ avenue, my hard-pressed twitter followers bear the brunt of my efforts to sell stuff. For some reason, they stick with me.

Masochists, the lot of them.

What’s your approach to marketing? Is it easier promoting the Victorian London books than pushing your own? Any tips?

The books are an odd mixture – one novel (my own), one anthology (my own, in that I put it together), and seven other titles, including a novel, diary, memoir and various bits of Victorian journalism, from the whimsical to the investigative. I can’t therefore say I’ve got a great overall marketing strategy other than ‘tweet about them quite a bit’, combined with a bit of sincerity. These are all books I think are great – even, ahem, my own – for which I have a deep and heartfelt enthusiasm. I think people warm to that – ie. I’m not pitching books because I’ve been in a sales meeting earlier that day; these are books which I love.

Is conventional publishing dead? A bit like being a sail-maker in the age of steam? Do you have plans to produce paper editions of any of the Victorian London books?

My novel The Diary of a Murder is already in print with Snowbooks. If anyone wanted to produce a print version of Daily Life in Victorian London I would be open to offers.  The other books – the out-of-print titles by Victorian and Edwardian authors – wouldn’t make much financial sense to produce in print. For a start, some can be found relatively affordably on www.abebooks.com. Secondly, I can make a decent royalty on an ebook published for £1.99 – to get the equivalent in print, you would need to triple the price and be fairly confident about achieving a certain level of sales – something that would be impossible to predict. The beauty of Amazon is that I can publish anything and, if it flops, I’ve only lost the time and effort; if it succeeds, I make a profit.

You have a non-fiction book coming out soon. But you’re not publishing it yourself. Who is? Why? And what’s it all about? Did you consider releasing it as a Victorian London publication?

Walking Dickens’ London was commissioned by Shire Books. It’s a print guide-book – and Shire have the rights to create an ebook version. It’s meant to be held in your hand as you walk around, and contains lots of lovely colour pictures of obscure bits of Victorian London – it’s a project that rather demands a print format, and Shire have excelled themselves in terms of layout and design. Fingers crossed, a nice electronic version will appear in due course.

My next ebook will be a non-fiction book about working life in Victorian London – based on my own research. Will people buy it? I have no clue. Regardless, I love the idea of getting my own work ‘out there’ immediately, without the usual 12 months’ gap involved in print publishing.

Any advice for anyone who might be thinking of dipping a toe in the e-publishing waters?

Publish only books you adore; proof-read; and tweet a lot.

Or use an alias.

Lee, aka @VictorianLondon, can be followed on twitter here.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part One here.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part Three here.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part Four here.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part Five here.

I imagine that most of the writers who choose this route are ones who have been unsuccessful in getting a conventional publisher to take them on. They’ve grown tired of waiting for the Man from Del Monte to say “Yes!” (seventies advertising reference) and have decided to take matters into their own hands. A few have found phenomenal success this way. Many more, I suspect, have not.

But good luck to them all, I say.

But it’s not just those who haven’t broken through the normal way who are deciding to self-publish. Many writers who have been published are either self-publishing additional books alongside their “legacy-published” work, or ditching the conventional model entirely and turning themselves into their own publisher.

Michael Gregorio is a successful crime-writer (actually a husband and wife crime-writing duo, Michael Jacob and Dani de Gregorio, he English, she Italian), the author of a wonderful series of historical crime novels featuring Hanno Stiffeniis, a magistrate in Napoleonic-era Prussia.

As last year’s economic crisis rocked the Italian ship of state, bringing down Berlusconi and bringing in a government of non-elected technocrats, Mike Jacob kept a highly illuminating and entertaining chronicle of the political, social and financial collapse of Italy over on the Michael Gregorio blog. He has now collected all those pieces together and published them as an e-book, INSIDE ITALY, available on Amazon.

As an Englishman writing about Italy,  Michael Jacob/Gregorio at times displays the outsider’s indulgence as well as exasperation at the foibles he is describing. But he combines that with an insider’s understanding of what’s really going on. The stuff the New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post and Economist don’t know about, as he puts it.

This is no tourist memoir of an extended stay in a foreign country. Michael Jacob has lived in Italy for 32 years and is married to an Italian. He knows the country as well as any Englishman can. The affection he feels for the country, and the vast majority of its inhabitants, comes through clearly. As he says himself, Italy is his idea of paradise. (He couldn’t live in England because it’s “dull”, or America because it’s “superficial”.)

He’s careful to challenge stereotypes, for example when his brother makes a joke about “Italian cowardice” following the Costa Condordia disaster. His humour is far more informed than that. Reading the pieces, I was reminded of the words of the Roman satirist Juvenal, who claimed (if my memory serves me right!) that indignation drove him to write. Reading INSIDE ITALY, with its tales, for example, of a parliamentary stenographer (an obsolete post, as the job of recording parliament could be achieved digitally) paid more than the King of Spain, it seems the people of Italy have much to be indignant about.

Publishing INSIDE ITALY as an e-book has enabled Michael Gregorio to get the book out quickly, while the events he is writing about are still topical, which has added enormously to the immediacy and appeal of the book. But events move quickly in politics, especially Italian politics. This again plays to the strengths of e-publishing. We’re promised a second volume in April 2012. If Volume One and recent events in Italy are anything to go by, I’m sure it will be an interesting read.

(INSIDE ITALY is available on amazon.co.uk for £1.01.)

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part Two here.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part Three here.

Read Adventures in e-Publishing Part Four here.

And if you can answer the following question (the answer to which is in the sample chapter) you could win a copy of the paperback:

What is the title of the poem Virginsky reads on the handbill?

First things first. Download the chapter, have a read, then use the contact form here to send me your answer. PLEASE DON’T LEAVE YOUR ANSWER IN THE COMMENTS TO THIS BLOG AS IT WILL GIVE IT AWAY TO EVERYONE ELSE!

All the correct answers received by 6.00 pm 8.00 pm (deadline extended) GMT Thursday January 26 will be entered into a draw made by Random.org, from which one winner will be selected.

Alternatively,

COMPETITION NOW CLOSED. THE WINNER WAS STACEY WOODS.

You can still download the first chapter, however. And if you like what you read, and would like to make sure of your copy, you can get the whole book for just £1.42 on kindle here. Or if you prefer a paper book, you can get it from any good bookshop, or from amazon.

The real heresy for me, as a crime writer, is that what I admire about Borgen is that it doesn’t rely on an ever-increasing body count to keep the viewer’s interest. In fact, so far, there have been no murders in it all. Just one death by natural causes.

Now such an admission may end up getting me thrown out of the CWA. And it’s not to say that I don’t still enjoy a good, twisty, grisly serial killer thriller. But it is interesting to see how the writers have managed to maintain the drama and tension without recourse to gore. The political shenanigans are of course fascinating. But more than anything it’s the fantastically well-written and superbly performed characters that keep us hooked.

My wife and I were watching it the other night and we were engrossed by the domestic tensions in the Danish prime minister’s house. Birgitte Nyborg (played by Sidse Babett Knudsen) is working flat out to keep her coalition together, her husband (played by Mikael Birkkjærs) is bearing the brunt of the household duties. I think we both identified with it a little, especially as from the beginning of this year my wife started working fulltime, with me stuck at home making the kids’ teas, nagging them to do their homework and practice, picking them up when they have after school activities, etc.. The whole thing was very close to home. Except, of course, that they are better looking than us, and have a fancier coffee pot. Funny the things you pick up on.

Anyhow, I think we were both seeing the parallels in our own relationship and perhaps feeling a little inadequate compared to our screen counterparts. And maybe also musing on the inadequacies of our other halves next to the paragons in the drama.

During one bedroom scene my wife commented of the husband: “He doesn’t snore.”

To which I could only reply: “You’re not the Prime Minister of Denmark.”

In all likelihood, you will speed-click back to google. Get the hell out of there! It’s some writer’s blog! If that’s the case,  you won’t be reading this now. So if you are reading this, the chances are you decided to spend a moment or two exploring. Trying to find out who the hell this R.N. Morris guy is.

So maybe, every now and then, I should take a little time to say a bit about myself and what I’m doing here. On the internet. With a website and blog. And everything.

So yes. I’m a writer. Of fiction. Crime. Mostly. Murder stories. Set in the past. In Russia. Sorry, I tend to come over all inarticulate when I try to talk about myself and my writing. Awkward. Especially when every writer these days has to be his or her own publicist.

I’ve written a series of four novels set in St Petersburg the the 1860s and 1870s. The central character of the series is Porfiry Petrovich, a character I took from Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment.

I’m told the books are at the literary end of the crime fiction genre. I don’t know anything about that myself. I just try to tell the stories as best I can.

If the series piques your interest, A Gentle Axe is probably the place to start. It’s the first book in the series. That’s not to say you have to read the books in order. Each one is designed to stand alone, but there is a progression in the relationships between the central characters. So. Up to you. The other books are A Vengeful Longing, A Razor Wrapped in Silk and The Cleansing Flames, the last of which was published in 2011. In April 2012, I’m publishing the first book in a new series, called Summon Up The Blood.

If you’ve got a kindle, you can download A Gentle Axe now for just £1.42. I know the prices change on amazon, so by the time you read this – if you get this far – the price may have changed.

Here are some of the things reviewers said about the book (which was called The Gentle Axe in America) when it came out:

“Lush, and exceptionally compelling, but take your time – R.N. Morris’s The Gentle Axe has a vast depth of Russian soul; mysterious, compassionate, and utterly irresistible. Alan Furst

“Morris’ recreation of the seamy side of 19th-century St Petersburg is vivid and convincing … As to who did it, Morris keeps the reader guessing until the end.” The Independent

“R. N. Morris has produced perhaps the most audacious police-inspector novel of the season with “The Gentle Axe.”….The tale hums along with controlled excitement, as if written by a Russian minimalist and rendered by a fine translator. The psychological and spiritual themes seem worthy of Dostoyevsky; there are traces of Gogol and Gorky, too. Such an accomplished book transcends pastiche.” The Wall Street Journal

“It’s a satisfyingly grisly yarn… “CSI: St. Petersburg.”” The New York Times Book Review

“[A] smart, hypnotizing tale of crime and duplicity.” The New York Sun

“The story is told ably in the classic whodunit twisty-arc style, reminiscent of the sleuthing of Nick Charles, Sherlock Holmes and Columbo, the mussed-up character based partly on Dostoevsky’s trench-coat-clad Petrovich. Dirty Harry could easily be referenced, too…” The San Francisco Chronicle

“Morris has created an atmospheric St Petersburg, and a stylish set of intellectual problems, but what makes A Gentle Axe such an effective debut is its fascination with good and evil. It has earned its author the right to make use of the work of a greater writer.” Times Literary Supplement

“A Gentle Axe is tense, atmospheric and bristles with the kind of intelligence you’d read, well, Dostoevsky for… a piece of literary fun.” The Independent on Sunday

“Morris has dug deep into the Russian soul in this book, and his dark, dank, dangerous St Petersburg, with its snowbound, windswept streets and stinking slums, is brilliantly recreated. The hunt for the murderer is tense and atmospheric: the denouement brutally shocking and moving. A worthy sequel to one of the greatest novels ever written: and a cracking thriller in its own right.” The York Press

The Bloody Meadow by William Ryan is the second of his Stalinist-era crime novels featuring Captain Alexei Korolev of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Division. The first, The Holy Thief, was my choice for Auntie Marjorie’s Christmas present on the It’s A Crime… blog. The Bloody Meadow was the book I read myself over the Christmas break.

The novel is steeped in an atmosphere of paranoia, right from the outset. The fall-out from Korolev’s last case has left him fearful of a visit from the dreaded NKVD security service. He knows that it won’t just be his own life that’s affected if he is arrested, but the lives of everyone he cares about.

But when the dreaded knock on the door in the dead of night finally comes, it is not the beginning of the end for him, but the beginning of a new case.  But why should a Moscow detective be required to investigate the apparent suicide of a young woman working as a production assistant on a film being shot in the Ukraine? Because the young woman in question was a “personal friend” of Ezhov, the powerful Commissar of State Security. Naturally, Ezhov wants the best available detective working the case. Unfortunately for Korolev, that just happens to be him.

The set-up is perfectly judged to express the precarious tension in Korolev’s position as a detective in Stalinist Russia. He’s called upon to uncover the truth, but he knows that if the truth he uncovers is not one his masters want to hear, then things will go very badly for him indeed. As ever, the detective finds himself between a rock and hard place. To add to the unease, he boards an aeroplane to Odessa, to begin a journey into an ever deeper anxiety, cast adrift from the familiar streets of Moscow.

The sense of alienation and fear comes to a dramatic climax in a shoot-out beneath the catacombs of Odessa. To solve the crime, Korolev has had to seek the help of “The King of Thieves”, a notorious criminal gang leader. Order is restored by recourse to lawlessness, perhaps a fitting metaphor for the topsy-turvy logic of the Stalinist state.

William Ryan has constructed an absorbing crime story, with overtones of a classic “closed community” mystery. His command of the historical, political, psychological and emotional texture of the time is incredibly impressive. He has moved himself and his protagonist effortlessly to the Ukraine, and manages to convey the relevant history of that region with an enviable deftness of touch. In fact, as a writer who has tackled a Russian setting myself, I found much to envy in this book! In short, The Bloody Meadow is bloody marvellous. (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)