All My Ebooks for 0.99 cents!

This whole ebook, self-publishing thing is a mystery. There is a TON of information about how you should do it, where you should do it… and plenty MORE about what price you should sell your ebooks for. I’m starting to suspect that pricing is really important (I know, that’s bloody obvious) but  I mean more so in a browser and search kind of way. Readers troll for a specific price, rather than anything else… perhaps. So for a little while I’m going to drop my ebooks down to a special price of 0.99 each and see if it has any significant impact. As before, you can go to Amazon for a Kindle edition or Smashwords for any other kind of ebook flavour. Apologies to anyone who have bought my books at the earlier prices. Drop me a line and I’ll try to figure out a way to make it up to you.

A Music Soundtrack to one of my novels.

My CD Soundtrack for And In The Morning:
Some of you may know that I wrote a music “Soundtrack” to accompany my novel “And In The Morning”. At this point I’m keen to try and make it available for free to anyone interested, but I’m not sure (yet) of just how to do that. Music “clouds” that offer third-party MP3 downloads tend to use file compression techniques that mess with the music’s quality- I don’t want that. But bear with me, I’ll figure out a solution. Most likely it’ll involve a link to this WordPress Blog site , because there are lots of neat plug-ins and stuff available through WordPress to achieve such things much more easily. If you’re really keen just email me at mailbag@graemehague.com.au and we’ll figure out something.

My awesome, brilliant and gob-smacking book trailer is online

Okay, I’m biased since I did the whole thing myself. Please excuse me for that. I’ve done two versions of the book trailer, one is a “full version” that covers all my existing ebooks but is probably a bit long for most people to endure. That’s on Vimeo here http://vimeo.com/27513617   or  there is a shorter “horror books” version on Youtube here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSOSEH2QpUU .
If you watch either of them, please leave a comment so I can keep track of things. Hope you like them!

Do you want to find good ebooks?

Maybe you’re like me. You’ve got a Kindle or an iPad (or something similar) and you’ve launched yourself into the world of ebooks. They’re cheap, plentiful and available on-demand within seconds- awesome! The trouble is, after a while, you discover that GOOD ebooks aren’t so easy to find. First of all, there is a tremendous amount of shit out there that’s promoted as the best-ever, most brilliant and entertaining books ever written… except those endorsements are written by the authors’ mums. Every unpublished man and his literate dog have embraced ebooks as a means to self-publish, even if they can’t spell- let alone write a decent novel. The really good stuff (or the new releases anyway) isn’t cheap at all, thanks to the publishers being in chaos about pricing. And a lot of backlist titles from famous authors you’d expect to be available… well, aren’t. Maybe the publishers are hanging on to them, maybe they can’t confirm the digital rights… who knows?

The reason I’m suggesting my ebooks are good- depending on your reading tastes, of course- is their track records. Of the eight I’ve now released seven titles have been published in Australia and around the world. Between the original publishing, subsequent reprints and licensing to Readers Digest (for one title) there are about half a million copies of my books on bookshelves somewhere. That’s got to stand for something. Only “Ghost Tales, Four Stories of the Dead Among Us” is a brand new title released by me exclusively as an ebook and is, I guess you’d say, unproven.

Yes, this post is a piece of blatant, unashamed self-promotion… which is where the publishing industry is heading, so you’d better get used to it. Look at the good side- you get to read a great book at $1.95 (Ghost Tales) and if you don’t like it, you can hurl abuse through the comments section below. Brilliant.

How NOT to promote your Ebooks!

Rule No#1 in promoting yourself is supposedly getting involved in online writing communities, forums, Facebook and the like. Anything social, right? So to “test the water” last night I registered at a forum called The Writer’s Forum (www.writersforum.com) where aspiring, established and indie writers are encouraged to share their thoughts, experiences and promote their work. I wrote a nice Introducing Myself post in the Introduce Yourself forum, then I posted in the Publishing Forum what I’d done in the past, present and future, how I’d just published my eight books as Ebooks (making no attempt to disguise the fact I was in promotion mode) and I also offered to discuss with anyone interested the process I’d just gone through. I was genuinely polite, honest and transparent (as my old boss like to say).

This morning I check the forum and see my post isn’t there… odd, but these things happen. I log on and bam! I’ve been permanently banned, never to be lifted, for spamming. This isn’t an auto-response thing. The noddy running the forum has deliberately decided to ban me.

So I wrote an email to the webmaster asking why I’ve been banned. Okay, I was a little pissed off and DID ask whether he was interested in having experienced writers contributing to the forum- or whether he just wanted unpublished people who would desperately resort to paying his sponsors’ for their dubious services- nasty I know, but jeez, an instant, permanent ban and being labeled as a spammer? I found that offensive and uncalled-for.

His response later was that I’d obviously not read the forum rules, which state that only “active members” can promote their published works and that I hadn’t proved that I was going to be a contributing forum member. Okay, I get that- but hell, who reads the rules? He was certain his forum members would “succeed without my expert advice”. I didn’t say I was an expert- I said I’d had plenty of experience to offer. There’s a difference he’s apparently incapable of understanding.

Now I could, in turn, reply that he is supposed to be a forum moderator not an internet demi-god and that a responsible moderator would have simply removed my post and sent me a brief message as to why I didn’t make the grade (yet) for promoting my books. I could also suggest that he personally, plainly hasn’t ever had anything published beyond the second-grade finger-painting his mother stuck on the refrigerator door for a week when he was 12 years old (think about that)… or maybe he just resented my achievements as a writer and enjoyed putting the (banning) boot in?

Lesson here is that if anyone finds themselves about to embark on a similar mission, perhaps a more stealthy approach to establishing a presence on these forums first is better? Apparently some writers forums aren’t particularly interested in people who have actually achieved anything and are willing to share that experience- or at least the moderators aren’t. It upsets the sponsors who, for god’s sake, don’t want informed, free advice being handed around instead of people paying for it.

All my novels are now Ebooks- and more!

It’s been a long process, basically because I didn’t want to do this thing half-arsed, but I’ve finally converted all my published novels- and a few more-into Ebooks for the world to buy, download and enjoy… I’m sure you get the idea. Most of my time was spent changing over eight novels in one go and there were a few issues. First, for some of my original manuscripts I didn’t have the final, edited versions of the Word files that ultimately went to the publishers. My first books were published at a time when manuscripts were still sent as hard-copy print-outs to the printers. Hey, before you think any further I’m not that old! We still wrote on computers and word processors, but the layout and printing wasn’t digital yet. Anyway, it proved to be an opportunity to re-edit those original manuscripts and stories. Clean them up a little and add a bit of the writing experience I (hopefully) gathered in the years since. Think of them as the 2011 “digitally remastered” copies of my books like they did with music albums. But it’s important to realise I didn’t update the stories. Don’t expect to see mobile phones and the internet in novels I wrote in the 1990′s. They weren’t around when I wrote those books and that’s the way I wanted to novels to stay.

Another thing that happened was I didn’t have a recent file of “Missing Pieces”, a crime novel that’s been selling really well in Germany. It was published in the US ages ago and that publisher even put out their own Ebook (without my permission I might add), but they couldn’t give me a file either. The crazy solution was to buy my own ebook (!!) and then use an Optical Character Recognition program to scan the pages back into my word processor… yes, it was tricky. Worse, the OCR didn’t recognise lots of things (like italics, believe it or not) and I had to painstakingly go through each page to reformat and re-grammar (if that’s a word) the text.

Next I created my own covers. This was a crash-course in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, but I’m pretty happy with most of the results. In the effort to get all my books done I compromised a little on some, but I can always go back and rework those.

Finally, I had to reformat the manuscripts again, because when you convert these things into a file suitable for an Ebook publication there are a few different rules you need to know. I won’t go into any details here, but if anyone is keen to ask me any questions please use the comment box and I’ll reply as quick as I can.

So now it’s done. I was tempted to offer one of my books for free- free ebooks! Nope, I just can’t do it. How about a cheap ebook? It’s a deal! My book “Ghost Tales, Four Stories of the Dead Among Us” is available for the huge sum of $1.95 and believe me, it’s a bargain because the four ghost stories combined are actually bigger than a normal book.

There is a page on this site dedicated to my ebooks with links to Amazon and Smashwords, where you can buy them.

Wish me luck. Any support anybody offers is greatly appreciated. Feel free to get in touch and I’ll try to reply quickly.

Graeme Hague July 2011

Building Your Own House- Why The Hell Would You? Part 1

Okay, I’d better explain something first. My wife Lisa and I are building a new house on our 7 acre property in South West Western Australia. Our town is a great little place filled with like-minded people and a lot of homes like ours… kind of “hobby farms” on small acreages but without the annoying animals. The thing is we’re building to “lock-up” and I’m doing the rest- like the plumbing, the electricals, all the plasterboard, kitchen… you name it. The builders are doing the four external walls and roof (and floor, obviously) and at the end of their bit you can actually “lock up” the house safely, but it’s little more than a shell with internal wall frames in place. I’ll point out right now I’m not going to be doing anything illegal. Things like electrical cabling and gas plumbing I’ll be doing to within safe margins and qualified tradesmen will (eventually) do the final connections. Twenty years working backstage in theatre have given me these skills, plus properties like ours are kind of unique in that they’re “isolated”. Meaning we don’t have (or will ever have) any connection to the town’s main water supply or any natural gas supply. So it’s not like I can try to connect up the bathtub and manage to drain the entire water supply for the country with a dodgy tap thread.

Our block is quite sloped and the house will be a timber framed dwelling, but on steel stumps and sub-floor. It’s poking kind of sideways into the hill to face north, so at one end the house is 600mm (2 feet) off the ground while at the far end it’s 4.5 metres high (yep, about 14 feet). The steel subfloor was built by sub-contractors, not the actual builders themselves. It’s encouraging to discover that shit can go wrong at the very beginning…

On the first day I went to see how things were going- feeling a little guilty, I might add that I was, but hey- it’s our house right? One of the young guys working on the steel had this odd habit of eating half his food and dropping the rest on the ground at his feet (ignoring the huge industrial bin nearby) much to the delight of our Great Dane called Boston and Luka, a Newfoundland cross. There’s bits of chicken, half-eaten burgers, cans of coke…  Now, it’s a building site, okay? They get messy and I can appreciate that I might find myself knee-deep in bloody rivet tails and steel off-cuts. But food scraps is ridiculous. So I had a chat to his boss, who was a very likeable chap, and he admitted “the fat bloke’s a bit of a pig” and he explained things would be cleaned up. 

A few days later I had another look. Progress was slowish, but to be fair it had been raining and no one wants to work on slippery, wet steel 14 feet off the ground. Mind you, when I say “steel” this shit’s alarmingly like tin foil and you just have to accept that theoretically it will be super-strong when everything is put together. Anyway, I noticed that many of the steel plates supporting the underneath of the house had only one tech-screw in them- yes, one. It’s a little silly, because you’d think anyone hanging off a ladder putting in these screws would use the opportunity to put in all four at the same time rather than drag the ladder back later. Again, I pointed this out to the foreman and he assured me these were only locating screws and the rest would be put in later.

Guess what? At the end of the week the job’s done, everyone’s gone home and I go to check things out. Sure enough, most of the steel plates still only have one or two screws in them. Not only that, but many of the lateral struts had been put in crooked and not screwed in either. The effect is like a house of cards that’s been pushed slightly and everything is twisted and not square… in other words, the likeable chap and his two workers (one of them fat, remember) had done a really shit job. They were crap tradesmen. Cutting a long story short, I complained to the builders, who came out to look for themselves and were (to their credit) quick to agree the workmanship was well below par. The steel sub-floor company was ordered to come out and fix things, but of course they were already involved in some other project and it took weeks to get them back (with Christmas looming, too). I believe someone else did the work, since it was “magically” fixed when I wasn’t around to check.

The thing is, what if I was an accountant or a nurse or a shoe salesman? No offence to any of those people- but I mean, what if I was someone who wouldn’t recognise those screws were missing? That the floor was crooked as all hell in some places? Some new house-owners must get seriously led astray by dickheads like those steel guys.

The lesson learned is- as everyone will tell you -don’t take anything for granted when it comes to stuff being done right. As my nephew recently pointed out, I want the house built properly, but the builders just want to build it quickly and get out. Or maybe not… we’ll see. As I write this I’m told that trucks are arriving at the block (we live ten minutes away in a rental house). This seems to be a direct result of some delicate, diplomatic negotiations by yours truly over the phone earlier this week.

I told the builders that I’m not paying the fucking $96,000 part-payment bill for the sub-floor until some bastard actually from the building company itself starts building the bloody house.

Apparently that did the trick.

January 14th 2011

Okay, I’m back at it.

All right, this is it- new year 2011 where I embrace all the internet “culture” and start using this stuff properly to promote my books, my eBooks, my music and a neat thing called “The Guerrilla Guide to Home Recording”, of which there will be a new edition this year. I’m also going to build a house (yes, a house)… well, the builders will make it to “lock up” meaning four walls, a roof and doors to keep burglers out- then I do the rest. I expect within 8-12 months we’ll have a fantastic new house filled with all the things Lisa and I need (power outlets everywhere- yay!) and… we’ll probably be divorced from the stress of it all.

Without doubt, I’ll expect there will be plenty of blogs under the “I’m Annoyed” category… no, hang on. I suspect it will be worth a category of its own.

So without further ado, let’s get some shit happening here.

After I have a beer… then I’ll do something.

I’ve been so slack…

I’m just taking a moment to apologise here to anyone who’s been calling in regularly to look for new blogs. I’ve been super-busy and keeping this website updated keeps slipping down the list of priorities. However, I will (I will, yes… I will) be far more diligent and start posting regularly.

Electronic Books- good or bad?

By now you should be aware that Amazon have launched the Kindle book reader in Australia. I’ve seen one- it’s pretty neat stuff. I used to be anti-Ebook not because of any kind of traditionalist thing, but because I could see they might cause more problems than advantages. Meaning, they wouldn’t become popular. But after having a Kindle in my hands and- more importantly, knowing how companies like Apple will respond by producing something better -I can now see how EBooks will (in my never-so-humble opinion) eventually take over the book industry… and maybe sooner than you think.

Cost is a dominant factor. At the moment in Australia it costs too much to buy a book (and no, we’re not getting into the Parallel Imports argument here) and to walk into a bookstore and make a choice actually represents a gamble- like, a big decision. No one wants to waste $25.00 or more on a novel that turns into a dud read. With EBooks costing around 75% less per copy, let’s say $6.00 a book, the chances of people risking their money will increase enormously. They’ll gamble six bucks on a new author.

However, here’s the rub. Quality control is a serious problem. You can go a respected Ebook publisher’s site and buy a novel with confidence that some kind of story appraisal and editing process was applied to the book- it was worth publishing. But there’s nothing to stop pretty well anyone “launching” their own supposed best-seller from their own website regardless of how good it is. In other words, the danger of Ebooks will be that the virtual bookshelves of the internet will be flooded with crap books written by bad authors who have no idea of their own lack of talent… and there’s plenty of them.

Okay, right now I sound like a wanker, but as a published author believe me that I’ve been approached by many wanna-be writers with manuscripts that are just awful- yet their owners simply can’t see the faults. They’re blind to their own writing’s failings and, in fact, get outraged when you point them out. I once was asked by a friend to evaluate one of his friend’s MS- a monster manuscript of about 300,000 words (say 600 pages) and the whole things was truly bad, I found it incredible that someone could write so much material and never once get a feeling that it had problems. I politely told this writer his MS was crap and threw it away… not out of spite, but because that’s what you do these days. Nobody returns MS’s anymore- the postage costs more than the reprint. It’s pretty standard practise to safely destroy someone’s print-out rather than mail it back. Next thing you know, this guy tops the list of conspiracy theorists and accuses me of “stealing” his story! What a dickhead. When I explained without the aforementioned politeness that his MS was absolute shit and not worth stealing anyway he still didn’t believe me. It took the intervention of the third party, the person who originally asked me to check out the MS for his “friend”, to get this guy to pull his head in.

He is the sort of person who will find a way to publish his masterpiece of crap as an Ebook and put it out there as a worthwhile read… and what’s to stop him? What will warn you, the book-buyer, that his novel is shit?

Maybe that’s the role of established publishers in the future? (Because they will lose the job of printing and distribution). Publishers will act as a marketing and promotional company as alway- and it’ll be tougher -but their best reputation may lie in providing quality books. Publishers will become the “quality control” filter for Ebooks written by new authors.

Meanwhile, established authors like myself will get to enjoy the best of both worlds for a while.

Soon I’ll be releasing my backlist as Ebooks from my website. There’s more in-depth details about these books on my home website at www.graemehague.com.au . I’ll give away some of them for free- there’s that marketing thing again. I reckon it’s going to be a very, very interesting time over the next few years.

What do you think?