Author Steve Barton is leaving copies of his book in public places. Here's an en exert from his website:

I have stupid ideas. I mean really stupid ideas. Without doubt the most stupendous was to open a restaurant with absolutely no experience, 200 miles away from home in a town I’d never visited before. But I’ve also had many, many smaller, but just as stupid, ideas. My latest, as an author, is to give my book away totally free. Actually, once you have ignored the fact that I’m encouraging people not to buy my book but instead give them the opportunity to read it for free, I think this is quite a fun idea.

I have left copies of Burnt! in public places: Café’s, restaurants, buses etc in the hope that someone will find it, read it, enjoy it and then in turn leave it somewhere different for someone else to find. I hope that people will be creative and leave the books in places where they stand a chance of reaching a wide audience: Take it on holiday or leave it in a hotel room.

By recording where books have been found and subsequently left, the journey the book takes can be tracked. To assist with this each book has been given an identifying ‘name’; each one relating to a celebrity chef (just to keep with a theme). So if you have found Gordon strewn across a park bench early one Saturday morning, or if you have been lucky enough to discover Nigella in your hotel room, please record the details here.

If you have found Gordon please post here

If you have found Jamie please post here

More celebrity books will be left in various counties over the coming weeks.

Far from stupid, this is a brilliant idea to get people to read your book and pass it on to other readers. Best of luck with it.

My wife and I had a short holiday, visiting my mother in law and spending a couple of days in the UK. If you're in London and got the chance, visit the Tate Modern. Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth installation is breathtaking.

Here at Spire we are getting more and more returning authors. Understandably enough, many are asking whether there's a discount for authors self publishing more than one book. The answer is yes, but for some reason we've never published them. Here's that situation remedied:

• Sell 10.000+ books per calendar year and receive a 100% discount on the publishing fee for book 2.
• Sell 5.000+ books per calendar year and receive a 50% discount on the publishing fee for book 2.
• Sell 2500+ books per calendar year and receive a 25% discount on the publishing fee for book 2.
• Sell 1000+ books per calendar year and receive a 15% discount on the publishing fee for book 2.
• Sell 500+ books per calendar year and receive a 10% discount on the publishing fee for book 2.
• Sell 250+ books per calendar year and receive a 5% discount on the publishing fee for book 2.

This discounts also apply if you are publishing two, or three, books at the same time. If your first book sells over 5000 books in the first calendar year after it has been published then you'll receive a 50% discount on the publishing fee you paid for book two at the end of that year. The above discounts are valid from October 17th, 2007.

Need something literary to listen to on the way to work? Try one of the many literary podcasts out there, created by writers and publishers. Here's a small selection to get you started:

• Agony Column
• Average Mortal Radio
• The Penguin Podcast
• Engaging the Word
• The Literate Loser
• Air Out My Shorts
• Drinks with Tony
• Librivox
• Pinky's Paperhaus
• Moby Lives Radio

Tags: Podcast

This just in from Publisher's Weekly:

Harlequin said yesterday that from this point forward it is making its complete frontlist catalogue available in e-book format. Active in the e-book marketplace since October 2005, with an initial publication schedule of nine titles a month, Harlequin will now be releasing more than 120 titles per month in both print and digital formats.

Harlequin’s e-books will be priced slightly lower than their print books and be available in Adobe, Microsoft Reader, MobiPocket, Palm and Sony formats. The company said it is launching this initiative because its customers embrace the immediacy and portability of the format and the titles do not go out of stock.

Here at Spire we will be making e-books available in the near future. Right now we're looking into who to partner with and how to get the best return for our authors.

One of our authors sent a mail today, asking whether we could double check his sales figures. He had checked his amazon ranking and according to those numbers he felt that his sales could be higher.
Unfortunately the amazon sales rank has little to do with the actual number of sales a book has made. Instead it is, amongst many other factors, both an indication of how well a book doing against other books and projection of future sales.

Steve Rhodes writes:

Later he reveals "One sale a day can put a title in the top 10,000 sellers; a sale every few days can land a title in the next tier of 100,000. When the rest of the list is updated each month, rankings are determined by a complex mathematical formula based on the most recent sale and the time between sales."
The article concludes by showing even a small number of books ordered can have a big impact on the rank: "...wishing won't make it so, but action can work wonders. Lew McCreary saw his well-reviewed thriller 'The Minus Man' (Penguin Books, 1994) locked in Amazon.com's dark middle kingdom since the start of the rankings. He regularly checked the ranking over several weeks. It barely budged. Last week's slot: 680,281. 'I just want to know what to do to get under 500,000,' he said last week.
"After some thought, Mr. McCreary, whose day job is editorial director of CIO, a magazine for chief information officers, rallied the magazine's staffers at lunchtime. He told them he would reimburse them for the book's $9.95 purchase price if they called Amazon.com and placed an order. Five hours later, 10 books had been bought, and Mr. McCreary was making a run for glory.
"By 5:35 p.m. his rank was 368. 'I feel like I have the bends,' chortled the author, preparing for a night of celebration. 'I surfaced much too quickly. I just hope I can stay up this high until morning.'"

Fluff has an in-depth information and graph page available, although you need to be a bit of a geek to understand it. Another explanation can be found here.

Tags: Amazon sales rank

My wife and I had tickets for the world premiere of Brick Lane yesterday. The premiere was part part of the Toronto Film Festival and as I had liked the book very much I was keen to see what the movie had to offer. During my time in London I had lived very close to Brick Lane. I know my way around the area and I am reasonably familiar with the lives of the Bangladeshi community who lives there.

I left the cinema somewhat disappointed. The thing I liked most about Monica Ali's book was that it managed to paint such a vivid picture of Brick Lane. The smells, the music, the hustle and bustle of Banglatown, as that area of London is also known as, jump off the page. Nazeen, the heroine, is alive in Ali's book. Her being married off at age 17 to a man she has never met, a man who lives in London - a city half way across the world from her native Bangladesh - is one of the most heartbreaking stories you can ever read. The movie skims these issues. There are too many scenes of wistful window gazing, too many flashbacks of Nazeem and her sister playing catch as children and not enough reality, not enough grit, not enough down and not nearly enough dirty. The comedian Eddie Izzard has a wonderful sketch parodying the difficulty UK films have with portraying emotions and Brick Lane too suffers from that very British disease.

Nazeem's initial suffering and her consequent growth into independence and freedom are pleasantly, at times beautifully, shot but ultimately a wonderful story is blandly told. Nazeem's sister, who is of such importance to Nazeem's development in the book, is reduced to writer of letters from faraway Bangladesh. Had I not read the book I would have had serious problems to understand what her significance was. Her failure to live an independent life in a society that treats a woman as the possession of her husband and her consequent slipping into prostitution is barely touched upon and when it finally becomes clear what is happening it comes as a total surprise for the audience.

So was it worth it? If you haven't read the book before seeing the movie then be prepared for a whole new depth of storytelling when you do read it. If you've read the book already, like I had, I suspect that you'll leave the cinema feeling slightly empty.

Tags: Brick Lane, Monica Ali, London, movie reviews

I just stumbled across an interesting Yahoo Group today. Here are the details:

This group focuses on book marketing, promotion, and publicity. In other words, How do authors go about finding readers and building their fan bases?

This is an international group of authors, publishers, editors, publicists and other involved in the book industry. Posts primarily deal with the final stages of book production and pre- and post-release marketing strategies. All questions relating to traditional, self-published print or ebooks are warmly encouraged.

Feel free to post tips, innovative promotions, new marketing avenues and, by all means, share your successes to inspire others. Please do not post excerpt texts, instead post a URL where your excerpt can be found.

Debate is a great thing provided we all remember that we're on the same side. Flaming is not allowed. We're all here to learn.

I just signed up for membership myself, so we might see each other over there.

Tags: Yahoo, Self publishing, Author Self help

Three authors who have just started using their free blogs are Steve Barton, Emma Carlton and Susan Wilson. Take a look, there's some good writing to be discovered.

I arrived home last night to an inbox that was, amongst other things, full of invitations to Quechup.com, a so called social networking site. Thing is, I don't really have any interest in yet another Facebook or LinkedIn clone site and so I declined the offer. Not wishing to appear rude I sent a quick note to the people inviting me, saying thanks, but no, thanks. Seems that was a good idea. This morning David St. Lawrence wrote back:

You are smarter than I was!

Do NOT follow up on that invitation. It is bogus and is the product of a spammer.

Here is the article I wrote about it yesterday:

SPAM WARNING - BEWARE OF QUECHUP
UPDATE: My inbox is full of email from people on my contact list who have received these bogus invitations from Quechup. I apologize for the inconvenience. See the story below:
The latest scam to hit the Internet is Quechup.com. 
They are generating spam that supposedly comes from your friends.
If you receive an email from me or anyone else inviting you to join Quechup, delete the email and DO NOT Sign UP.
I received an invitation supposedly from another blogger and while I was checking the site out, Quechup has mailed an invitation from me to everyone in my email address book, even though I expressly requested that they should not do so.
Quechup claims to be a "social network."
It is owned by iDate and is actually some sort of dating service. 
Don't go there and don't bother to check it out.
You will definitely regret it.

So, if you too have received multiple Quechup invites, don't bother following up, unless you're planning on spamming all of your contacts.

Tags: Quechup, Spam

This coming Monday is a holiday here in Canada, Labour Day. Traditionally this marks the end of summer and the beginning of the cooler (and cold) months ahead. The heat of July and August will soon be only a memory and instead of switching on the air conditioning we'll switch on the heating. My wife and I will take advantage of the beautiful weather and spend a couple of days up at Lake Huron, close to Kincardine. The water should will still be warm enough for swimming and the forecast is sunny.

See you all next week.

I was browsing a number of literary blogs when I noticed a blog named Girl with a one track mind. Before you click through please do keep in mind that this links to adult material. No nudity, but the subject deals with human sexuality.

This Girl with a One-track Mind, who called herself Abby Lee, had for several years written a very popular blog, journaling her sexual adventures as a single girl looking for Mr Right, living in London. A publishing contract soon followed (sex sell, after all) and Abby was offered a healthy advance on her book, rumoured to be in six figures. I read some of her blog entries and all of a sudden it clicked, or so I thought at the time.

In 2004 a young woman from London, who called herself Abby, had published four books of erotica with us. They were semi-autobiographical. The style these books are written in is very close to Abby Lee's book. The 'adventures' described are almost identical. Could this be the same women? And if so, why hadn't she told us? I shot off a mail to one of my colleagues who deals with our submissions to amazon and other book traders. Here's her response:

I hate to burst your bubble but this isn't our Abby, different woman with the same name writing the same material but not our lady.
Amazon mixed up the two authors last year and I had to sort it out. So unfortunately, no, they aren't the same author.

I still think that the similarities in writing are very, very close. So you might want to take a look, especially if you enjoyed Abby Lee's book. Here's a link:

And here's a link to one of the books 'our' Abby published:



PS: Here is what The Times has to say, the paper that managed to unmask Abby Lee.

So I take a look at our help@spirepublishing.com account this morning and this is one of the mails that arrived overnight:

The final pdf of my book is attached, it already has an isbn but I need someone to distribute it and submit it to the bookstores. It is already available on amazon and the online book stores as I self published it with lulu.com (I am the publisher) but I want someone to distribute it to bookstores, while still retaining all rights and be able to back out of our agreement at any time. I don’t want to pay the initial 400 or whatever dollar fee you have as my book is good enough that you should want to take it on without that.
 
Please consider
 
-          Name removed to protect the innocent

Truth be told, we haven't had one of these for a while. "We'd like to use your services, but you should be working for free" - we get all sorts of mails, but these are remarkably rare. Anyway, here's my reply to him:

Hi XXXX

Thanks for sending us your book. Three things:

1. If you have already self published with lulu.com, and you have an ISBN number, then your book should be available to bookstores already. If not, then please consider upgrading your lulu.com account - I know that lulu offers the distribution services you require for a fee.

2. We are a self publishing company. That means that the author pays for the publishing services he or she needs. If you're unwilling to make this contribution then I suggest trying to find a traditional publisher who might be willing to publish your book for you. The first step in that direction would be to secure an agent who starts representing you to potential publishers - there is little reward in sending manuscripts unsolicited to publishers these days.

3. We are a publisher. That means that legally we can't just take a book you've published and pretend it is one of ours. If you wish to take advantage of our services then you need to re-publish your book with us.

4. Your book does not meet our formatting standards. Your book is justified left only, paragraphs are running together, the legal page is incomplete. The document formatting is incorrect for our books and there are potential problems with the fonts you've embedded. So even if point one to three would not apply we could not publish the book in it's current state.

Best regards, and best of luck,