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At the Sharpe End My second published novel. Click the cover for more information, including ordering signed copies:
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 David Slater, a conscript in the 1920s Army of the Confederacy, faces a dilemma. When he and his regiment were shipped to Germany to help stage a coup there, his Limey fellow-soldier Brian was acting strangely. David now has the choice of reporting his best friend to his commanding officers, or keeping quiet and just doing his job: preparing for the arrival of Bismarck, the giant Zeppelin flying Hitler and his Nazi cohorts to meet their new allies, the Confederates. More on “About Beneath Gray Skies” here…
Lem Fugitt, who is largely responsible for pushing me into buying an iPad (well, Steve Jobs has to take some of the blame, and I must share the remainder) has made an interesting comment on my Facebook page.
This is all to do with Flipboard, a very pretty aggregator service for the iPad that allows you to scrape content from online sources into pages arranged like a magazine. Tap on an article and you get the first paragraph, tap a bit further and you get to the Web site itself, to read the full article. You can post links to the article through Twitter, and indeed, you can add your Twitter and Facebook accounts as feeds to your “personalized” magazine (I remember speaking about this as a concept at a conference in Yokohama some 15 years ago).
The question is, does this constitute “fair use”, or are the users of this service getting something for free (i.e. the ad-free content without the distractions)? I use an ad-blocker on my browser, and I also use the Safari 5 Reader feature a lot. Is this any different?
More on “Should I care about Web piracy?” here…
I’ve only had the beast for a few days, so maybe the question is a little premature, but I think the answer is “probably it will end up being a life-changer”.
Yes, it’s just an overgrown iPod touch. But the iPod touch has been with us for so long now (how many years is so long?) that it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary it really is. Instead of a mass of fiddly little mechanical buttons and modifier (shift, control, alt, etc.) keys to change function, the interface changes shape as required, and you point directly at it. Before I had an iPhone, I had a Nokia – one of the few smartphones (and it wasn’t really that smart) available in Japan at the time. It did a lot, but the integration with the computer was weak. The iPhone actually got me to use my phone as a pocket computer – even a book reader.
So who needs an iPad? I was surprised by the quality of the display for photos. Who needs a digital photo frame? And I “have an app for that”™ for almost all the things I do on a regular basis outside the home (word-processing, spreadsheet, whatever).
But the big thing has been e-books. I have three book readers (all free) on the beast, and I’m impressed by all of them in their different ways.
First, Stanza is very customizable. Pinch and zoom to change text size. Takes ePubs, and it has a wide range of free (and paid) downloads available from inside it.
iBooks – as you might expect from Apple, it has the glitziest interface and is less customizable than Stanza. A little lacking in some areas, but very usable indeed. Allows me to read books that I haven’t bought from Apple, including free ones. Pictures in ebooks work well with this.
And Kindle – which I like much more than I expected now I’m using it on a large screen. The Whispersync technology is very cool, the purchasing from Amazon is dangerously easy, and the display, while undistinguished and not terribly imaginative, is perfectly readable.
I expect to be using the iPad more and more for books – not the books I want to keep, but the ones I want to read once for reference, or just as throwaway light reading. As someone mentioned on the Web the other day, the next rational step is to have a “Buy a paper copy of this book” button that will send a print order to a POD house to have the book shipped to your door in a day or so (with a slight discount as the result of having purchased the ebook copy earlier). I shall be delighted when that comes to pass.
In the meantime, I’d welcome other people’s comments on the ebook readers available on the iPad.
This really isn’t worth mentioning, perhaps, but I can now post to my Wordpress blog from my iPad. This means that you will probably see a lot more rubbish from me in the future.
On a more positive note, the first box (22 copies) of At the Sharpe End arrived today. Just over 3 weeks, which isn’t too bad. But the other 28 have yet to arrive. Weird.
I’m really starting to wonder how the US economy continues to hold up, with these supposedly high-tech market leaders who still seem stuck in the 19th century when it comes to payment mechanisms.
Google first – they’re a tempting target
I looked at their AdSense program and started the sign-up process (I’m not actually that keen on the idea of third-party ads on Web sites – sometimes they’re totally and comically inappropriate, but I thought – well, let’s see, shall we?). I tell Google that I live in Japan, and the address field actually provides a pop-up list of prefectures (in kanji, in the middle of an English form, but we’ll let that ride for now). So Google actually realises that not everyone lives in a “state” and they don’t all have “zip codes”. Good – they do know there are other countries out there (so many US companies seem to think the US way of doing things like addresses and phone numbers is the world standard – it’s not!).
So… payment details. Where do I want my checks sent? Checks?? We’re in the 21st century. I haven’t written a cheque (check) for about 20 years. They don’t exist in Japan for personal accounts. When I go back to the UK, I pay by debit card or credit card. Can’t Google credit my credit card? I thought they had a Google payment system (never used it – always use PayPal for things). Can’t they force me to sign up for that? Or pay me in camels and I’ll send back the change in goats? Or something. If someone in Google is savvy enough to know that Japan has prefectures, isn’t someone else in there savvy enough to know that checks in Japan are as much use as a chocolate teapot?
Next, Amazon
First, if I publish through Amazon’s Kindle process, all my payments are made by check. OK, same thing applies. Give me Amazon credit, credit the credit card you have on file, send cash in an envelope, but for heaven’s sake, DON’T SEND ME CHECKS!
Next, the speed of Amazon’s reaction. I realize that Amazon is a large company. They deal in millions of books. They are overworked and they had to attend their parrot’s mother’s funeral. I don’t want to know. Why does it take so long to get a customer-uploaded image file onto a book page (Amazon UK)? And why does it take at least 2 weeks for a book to change status from “Not available yet” to “In stock” and get the description up there on the subsidiary sites? Wouldn’t you think that a book that suddenly hit the top 50 in a particular genre would be fast-tracked into some kind of promotion?
And the Look Inside? Why does it take so long to take a formatted PDF from the publisher and turn it into the Look Inside format?
OK, it’s hot, I’m sweaty and annoyed and waiting for the mailman to deliver my first edition. But I look at Smashwords, which is a small operation (I get the feeling it’s half a dozen people at most) – very busy, and extremely efficient – and pays by Paypal. Why can’t Google and Amazon look at these people as a model of how to deal with suppliers?
 One of the things that Steve Jobs promised us with the iPad was an age of all-singing, all-dancing ebooks. No longer would we be constrained by the limitations of pure text. Characters would speak to us, soothing music would guide us through the descriptive packages, and video would replace our imaginations (now assumed to be atrophied through too many years of TV and movie special effects). It’s doubtful if one person is capable of of producing all the material needed for such a multimedia package. How many movie producers do you know, for example, who are great musicians and who can write books and take and edit pro-quality photographs?
Well, quite apart from the hassle of producing such a publication (and actually, a simple text-only ebook is not altogether simple), there’s another objection why this just ain’t gonna happen. Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal points out that the issues of obtaining permission and copyright for such multimedia “quotes” can end up being more trouble than they’re worth. He cites his own experience:
When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.
I love Joe Henry, but the price was too high. I replaced him with Shakespeare, whose work (depending on which edition you use) is in the public domain. Mr. Henry’s record label may differ, but it’s not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here.
And this is only for quotations using words. If you start adding music, images or video to your “vook” (video book) is going to really make the lawyers happy. Here’s another look at the process:
“Though an enhanced e-book would appear to be a digital product, in fact most of the processes necessary to produce it rely on the traditional and extremely tedious tasks of clearing rights and permissions, something publishers and agents have been doing for a century. For nothing more than a single image you will have to track down the credit line for the photographer or artist to give proper attribution; then you need to ascertain the source – where was it originally published? Then you must examine the contract to learn the terms by which the image was acquired. One time use only? Or did the purchaser buy rights in perpetuity? If the latter, you need to locate the purchaser to negotiate permission. If you’re using the image worldwide you need to clear permission with copyright owners in each territory (North American, UK, foreign language publishers, etc.
“And that’s for one image. If you use dozens, plus copyrighted texts, plus YouTube videos, plus movie clips, music and other protected works, the clearance process can be so daunting as to be not worth it.”
More on “Words are not dead (enhanced ebooks may well be)” here…
 Amazon UK has a section called “Lad Lit” – in other words, adventure stories for non-YA male readers. It’s really the market where I’ve aimed At the Sharpe End (well, to be honest, I didn’t aim it deliberately, but it worked out as that sort of book).
I was shocked and stunned, to coin a phrase, that because of my promotion, At the Sharpe End had reached number 36 (it’s slipped a little in the last hour) in this section. This is before the cover is available – before the book is even listed as available through Amazon. The overall sales ranking is 80,000 – which is not bad at all.
The attached image gives you some idea of what the competition’s like: I’m beating out a Clive Cussler, Fight Club and The Best A Man Can Get (good book, by the way) and a Tom Clancy-branded thing. Higher up on the list are a Rider Haggard and a John Buchan, as well as an Ayn Rand (that’s an oddity).
I have a feeling won’t stay at these giddy heights for long, unless this thing really starts to take off virally as a result of being popular, but it’s a nice feeling while it lasts!
OK, this is silly. I posted a few paragraphs of Beneath Gray Skies into the “analyze your style” site, and it told me Raymond Chandler. I then tried with an except from At the Sharpe End and it told me I was like Ian Fleming.
I was flattered, I suppose, until someone told me that they had pasted in the first few chapters of Moby-Dick and got Raymond Chandler!
But it got me thinking… Is it possible to write parts of Moby-Dick in the style of Raymond Chandler? Here’s my (not terribly good) attempt at the first part. I would like to see other people’s efforts. If you feel inspired, post them as a comment here:
I opened my eyes. From the way the sun was shining through the window I guessed it couldn’t have been much after three in the afternoon. It felt like a big white whale had been sitting on my chest and then wrapped its flukes round my head. Rum will do that to you every time. Call me… Oh, the heck with it, just call me Ishmael and have done with it.
There must be a lot of people out there who can do much better than that.
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Recent Beneath Gray Skies posts
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David Slater, a conscript in the 1920s Army of the Confederacy, faces a dilemma. When he and his regiment were shipped to Germany to help stage a coup there, his Limey fellow-soldier Brian was acting strangely. David now has the choice of reporting his best friend to his commanding officers, or keeping quiet and just doing his job: preparing for the arrival of Bismarck, the giant Zeppelin flying Hitler and his Nazi cohorts to meet their new allies, the Confederates. More on “About Beneath Gray Skies” here…
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