Launch day minus 5 - for social media Luddities only
I have resisted Facebook all these years…but relent, somewhat hypocritically, after slagging them off for their role in the Cambridge Analytica data theft scandal, and create an account. Thirty minutes in, I am blocked…as in shut out forever! NO idea why because FB doesn’t tell you why. Is this the shortest membership ever?
Find myself having to prove my ID with proper, as in official legal documents.This alone exemplifies everything that's wrong - what other company needs to see this kind of stuff? And don't get me going on why women have to 'prove' who they are if they use their maiden names after marriage. Facebook say they will only keep copies of these docs for a year unless you uncheck the relevant box. Why isn't anyone protesting about all this? I can't because I can't find who to protest TO. I'm locked out. Time to revert to some old-fashioned letter writing: paper trails have their place.
A quick search reveals Facebook have blocked people out of important work accounts without rhyme nor reason - no explanation given, no apology offered.
Find another reading for Zoe, although I am slightly worried it gives too much of the plot away. On the other hand, sex trafficking is a key theme and I reckon important to put across this at the launch.
Do: commit to the social media work best for you and, above all, in a timeframe that doesn't distract you for ever more from writing what you really want to write.
Launch day minus 4 – the books arrive (but I can’t bear to look)
Ten author copies arrive from Amazon. It’s pathetic but I can’t bring myself to open the box. What if there’s a mistake that can’t be fixed? I know if I see the merest glitch of an error, I’ll obsess for the next week. Decide to wait until the morning.
Focus on my blog on the ten things I wish I’d known before self-publishing. I’m using Wix for the site which is pretty user friendly. I feel far more comfortable with the word side of things than working out the tech. Even so, watch various 'how to' videos to get my head around the importance of maximising the SEO. Mmmm.
Still blocked from Facebook. Is it because the word ‘assassin’ is in the book’s title? A mystery. For a comms-based platform, they are by some degree the worst communicators I have dealt with. Ever. And that’s saying something having wasted days of my life on the phone to BT, Sky and TALK-TALK. But wait, they are comms companies too... beyond their smoothie ads, are they the worst communicators in business?
Do: flesh out a few blog ideas in advance – they won’t all work.
Do not: sign up for Facebook…Hang on, what did I write in the line above? You have to. Bastards.
Launch day minus 3 – holding the first copy
Husband opens box of books and…they look terrific. To hold a physical copy is a good moment.Thank you fab designer Mark Thomas (who I found on reedsy.com the marketplace for independent authors) and Amazon’s printers who are based in Poland. They did a great job. What a relief.
Decide to add to the PowerPoint slides (see previous blog). The smuggling of antiquities is only the start: in The Assassin’s Head, the real impact of the war in Iraq falls on to the women who, as women always are in the aftermath of conflict, extremely vulnerable to criminal gangs, especially traffickers. The latest estimate suggests that 25 million* women, men and children are the victims of trafficking around the world, of whom 71 per cent are women and girls.
54 per cent of all victims are trafficked for sexual exploitation. [Source: International Labor Organization, 2018]
Meanwhile, I am constantly referring back to the KDP rules on self-publishing – including who can and cannot leave reviews. I often leave reviews but now as an author, I cannot apparently leave a review for a ‘rival’. Who is a ‘rival’? No idea. Will doubtless discover and let you know.
Do check out Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur on his YouTube channel on the whole issue of leaving reviews because the rules are confusing and timing seems to be everything. In a nutshell, and please double check this, you CAN give away free copies and hope for reviews, whether positive or otherwise, but you cannot financially incentivise a review, for example, by saying: ‘review me and I’ll repay you the money for buying my book.’
Do not lose sight of your creative side through all of this. At times, it’s easy to feel as if you’ve had a major career change and moved into full-time marketing. At the risk of stating the obvious: as an independent author, you have no choice BUT to become a committed marketeer.
Still blocked from Facebook.
Launch day minus 2 – distractions and deadlines
I’m a trained journalist, I love deadlines. I give myself 24 hours to stop faffing and finish off the website, the Amazon author page, tweet like mad, well at least twice, to my eight followers.
I’m an journalist. I love faffing, distractions and deadlines.
Speaking of deadlines, I noticed a piece in the London Times saying that Dominic Cummings who is single-handedly rewriting the British Constitution (technically speaking, as i'm sure you know, it’s not written down at all, so he’s merely searching for weaknesses to exploit, just as he did with some success in 2016).
Anyway, as part of his proposed redraft of our national psyche, he’s warned the numerous special advisers, or 'spads' who work for different government ministers and departments, that they’ll be summarily dismissed if they leak a word of any meeting, paper or strategy to the press. And if the poor spad appeals against said sacking via an employment tribunal, they’ll be finished, as in to Cummings they’ll be ‘dead’.
Moreover, he warns, journalists will never protect their sources’ confidentiality. He is actually suggesting that if special advisers DO leak something crucial, something we, the country, need to know before we turn our back on the continent that provides 60 per cent of our food, that journalists will blab. Why? Because they (the journalists) won’t ever want to fall out with the great Dominic Cummings!
Why on earth would he believe that to be the case? He's either lying (he's married to an alleged journalist who thinks nothing of slagging off in print the dead victim of knife crime, but that's another story). Is it because Mr Cummings has spent far too long in the company of his boss and believes everyone is in the same vein as that telltale tit of a PM?
Boris Johnson is a telltale tit because when he was a journalist himself, he agreed to give his millionaire friend , the crook Darius Guppy, the address of another journalist against whom Guppy had a grudge because the journalist had the temerity to investigate Guppy’s business dealings. Guppy was going to ‘break his ribs’. However, Guppy was jailed for fraud so the assault never took place.
Sometimes a childhood insult is the best. If you’re too young to have chanted ‘telltale tit’ in the playground (or had it chanted at you), here are the words. Apply where necessary. Far more effective than over-used Anglo-Saxon.
‘Telltale tit
Your tongue shall be split
And all the dogs in the town
Shall have a little bit.’
Do: spend time procrastinating, faffing around and getting cross about the arrogance of the unaccountable powers in public life. Getting involved can make a difference.
Do not: spend time procrastinating, faffing around and getting cross about the arrogance of the unaccountable powers in public life. It’s not as if you can make a difference.
Launch day minus 1 – sound and vanity
Record an excerpt from the book to send Zoe, so she can hear my take on it. Several blogs recommend reading your work out loud. It’s a useful exercise, particularly if you are stuck, and then later if you're considering getting the audible narration added on Amazon.
There are various options for doing this: you can read your book yourself but you’d need to pay for a decent recording and editing facility – or you can commission a specialist reader from Amazon. You then split the royalties 50:50 or you can pay your reader a one-off fee up front and keep the royalties yourself. Costs are worked out on the time it takes the artist to record your word length.
Daughter has sweetly treated me to the third facial I’ve had in my life. It’s bliss and actually I do not even mind leaving the salon with NO make-up on. And this is someone who can’t head to the gym without a slather of something. (I know, sorry.)
I should have got going on all this build up to the launch at least six months ago. That’s what all the blogs and advice forums reckon (I realise BTW it should be fora, but 'fora' is as irritating as using the plural after the word ‘data’…) But, honestly, after you’ve built up your lists of potential reviewers, sussed out the myriad ways of beating Amazon’s algorithms and blogged and blagged your way to a social media frisson, who has time to focus on the other vital stuff like editing, design and typesetting?
Still blocked from Facebook. Why?
Launch day – a blast – thank you
The launch is in a great pub called The Pineapple in Kentish Town. I'm touched at the immense support and turnout. The books sell out, which I genuinely wasn’t expecting especially as, beyond my mates, I didn’t think everyone would buy a copy. Then I worry that these copies won’t count as a ‘verified purchase’ on Amazon – they don’t. But surely one can’t have a book launch without actual books?
Gill Webber is a fantastic Master of Ceremonies. She does a Q and A and being able to talk about the book is cathartic: why I wrote it, what the themes are (the effects of the aftermath of war on women particularly; sex trafficking and antiquities smuggling); why I aim to write distinctive voices for women. One audience member asked a great question: 'Who was the hardest character to write?'
Zoe’s two readings contribute so much to the launch.
Do not drink until after you’ve done your official launch bit. I fear I’m still sweating neat alcohol days later at a terrible gym session when I somehow manage to fall off the rowing-machine seat. How? No idea.
Thank you to everyone who's bought The Assassin's Head so far. And if you're about to launch your own book, remember to step back to enjoy it for a few moments. Here's to you.