Derek Haines's blog

The Endless War

My very special guest blogger today is Jack Eason. Author of Onet’s Tale. As fellow antipodeans lost in Europe, we share a special out of place experience. So sit back, read and enjoy a little taste of Jack’s wonderful writing.



The Endless War

No one knew the reason why the ritualistic war had begun. Or indeed, who started it, and even more to the point, why it continued. The endless winter months were spent in brutal and bloody battles between the people of Farren and the Tribes of the River in the wide plains of the valley. During the spring, and summer, right through until the harvest was gathered in the late autumn, peace reigned across the land, and then the completely crazy cycle of destruction began once more.
***
Idrell stood on the smooth ice covered rock, protected from the icy winter winds by his warm bearskin cloak, shielding his eyes with his hand from the reflected sunlight coming from the blanket of virgin snow that covered the wide plain. In the distance, he could see the Tribes of the River as they formed up in their straggling ranks, their weapons glinting in the sunlight. He turned to his companion.
“Gar, why do we do this, what purpose does it serve except to keep our numbers down?” he wondered. Gar looked at Idrell with a puzzled expression on his face, “because the Tribes of the River are our enemy,” Gar replied, “what other reason do you need Idrell?”
Idrell shook his head in disbelief at Gar’s reply as he climbed down from the icy rock and mounted his horse. As the two friends rode back to the head of the Farren army, Idrell’s mind filled with endless questions.
***
Idrell and Gar were lifetime friends. Idrell’s father Briam was the king of Farren, and Gar’s father Drevi was his lieutenant. Both men were now too old to participate in the ritualistic war, so their sons acted as leader and lieutenant in the endless bloody winter battles, while the two old friends remained in the old castle keeping warm by the roaring fire in the great stone hall.
***
Idrell drew his sword from its sheath beneath the warm folds of his cloak and reluctantly signalled the advance, leading the way with his horse slowly trudging through the knee-deep snow. Gar rode along and through the ranks of old and young men and boys, eagerly stirring them forward with the flat of his sword. Idrell wasn’t the only one who often wondered about the war, half of his army felt the same way!
As both sides closed the distance between them, they broke ranks to form smaller fighting units. Soon the sounds of sword, battleaxe, and war hammer striking their deadly blows filled the air. Injured men on both sides were trampled by their comrades as the battle reached its bloody climax.
Both the Farren army and the Tribes of the River were locked in the deadly ritualistic battle, neither side giving an inch in the struggle to dominate the blood soaked snow covered battlefield.
***
Idrell looked across the heads of his troops to where his opposite number, Riana, Queen of the Tribes of the River, sat on her horse. They looked at each other for a moment and then both bowed their heads and saluted each other with their swords. Battle horns blasted the air and both sides withdrew to their own lines to lick their wounds.
Hundreds of men and boys lay mortally wounded or dead in a tangled bloody heap. Their warm breath, mixed with the warmth given off by their sweat-covered bodies formed a low misty cloud that gently spiralled into the crisp air of the cloudless sunny winter’s day.
***
Briam looked up and stared at his old friend Drevi. The cold winter winds howled and made the old stone building creak and groan. Both men nodded in agreement.
“Idrell, Gar, wake up boys, it’s time for bed,” Briam said, as the two men looked at their young sons lying at their feet on the warm bearskin rug in front of the roaring fire.
“Who won father?” Idrell asked, as he yawned.
“Neither of you son, it was a draw,” he said, as he picked up the chessboard and put away the pieces...

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A Time of Pain

My guest blogger today is Valerie Brooks. Better know to some as Valiant Val. Her writing style has impressed me ever since we crossed each other’s path by some weird but fortunate flash of fate for me. So please read on and ‘feel’ the wonderful hard edge in Valerie’s words.

A Time of Pain

“I am here,” I whisper breathlessly, yearning for you to appear to me. Our secret place, where we used to always meet, where I find myself alone again. The night is still, the air cool against my skin. I shiver, naked and cold. If only I could feel your warmth again, to feel your arms encompass me, pulling me into the safest place I know. Where have you gone, my love? My soul is empty without you, my life a void of bleak existence. Are you punishing me? Oh, what have I done for you to leave me alone and afraid.

I fall to my knees, feeling the rocky surface breaking the flesh on my knees. Yet the only pain I feel is the absence of you. I beg of you, my love, return to me! A gust of wind beats against me, bringing with it a steady chilling rain. My tears mingle with the falling drops, falling over my cheeks, icy freezing slivers left as tracks. “I’m so sorry,” I barely manage as my grief consumes me and I fall on the rocks beneath me. I lie frozen, staring into the dark chasm in front of me, I am empty, I am dead without you. I am frozen. My eyes close against the pain, I am consumed by darkness.

“I am here.”

Could it be?

“I am here, my love.” Your mimicked words pierce my mind as I feel myself being lifted from my frozen sorrow. I surrender to your warmth, your arms holding me against your chest. I press my ear against you, needing to hear your heartbeat. I am calmed. The warmth of you begins to melt away the icy cold. I surrender. I am yours. Please take me with you, I plead in my mind.

Your lips press against mine as you hold me closer. I reach up to your face, I need to feel you. “Look at me,” you demand, but I cannot. I cannot open my eyes. I shake my head no, and feel the darkness reaching out to me from my heart. I want to stay here with you, my love, forever.

You walk, carrying me for what seems like forever. I will not complain, forever, with you is where I want to be. Feeling you next to me, near me, in me. I sleep, comforted by you. Upon waking I feel I am on a soft pile of pillows, I sense you are in the room with me, but I will not open my eyes. You come to me, pressing your body against mine, I am consumed. I can see the emerald blaze of your eyes in my mind as I feel you press your face into my neck, your hands exploring my body. It’s ecstasy, you against me. I wonder if you feel it too? The weight of you pressing down on me arouses my very essence, the stubble of growth on your chin raking across my skin only serves as an aphrodisiac, rocking me to my core. “I love you,” I moan, feeling the heat of your breath against the side of my face.

You pin my arms above me with one of yours, asserting the control you have over me. I will always surrender to you. My love, the man I trust. “Look..at..me,” you command in a whisper against my ear. I slowly open my eyes, tears begin falling, I am unable to stop them. Again, you are gone. Again, the emptiness consumes me as I roll over in bed staring out the window as the sun begins its trudging journey across the sky. Another day I have to survive without you, my love. Come back to me tonight, oh please return to me.


Find more of Valerie’s writing on her blog or follower her on Twitter


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The Indie Hypocrites

We all know that the book publishing industry is in turmoil at present. Major publishers are confronted with serious challenges to their market dominance and it is clear they are still undecided as how to handle the growing e-book market.

At the same time, the rapid growth in self-publishing or ‘indie’ authoring has meant that a book buyer is now not guaranteed a quality product just because a book is ‘published’ per se. Thank goodness for the advent of preview reading in this respect. In the end though, is it that a good book in either form will always sell? Far from it. As with any product, it is marketing that sells, not talent.

As far as marketing goes, there is still a dominant advantage for major publishers as they dominate physical street front book stores. Very, very few book stores stock POD (print on demand) books. They can order books for customers, but who wants to wait? So ‘indies’ have had to go it alone promoting their books via online book stores. If you are an author, or involved in publishing you know all this.

The question I would like to pose is this. What books do ‘indie’ authors buy?

While my anecdotal evidence is just that, anecdotal, I have been looking at what ‘indie’ authors say about the books they buy and read, and how they go about marketing their own books. Social media is a great resource for this. In the last few months, I have come to some unpleasant conclusions.

(1) ‘Indie’ authors always think their own book is just fantastic. Naturally. And want people to buy it. Of course. But at the same time have no instinct to support fellow authors by buying another author’s ‘indie’ book. Dan Brown, Stephen King and MacMillan publishing are still their preferred book purchases.

(2) As far as marketing goes, ‘Check out my book on Bookbuzzr’, or ‘My book preview was read 2 times yesterday‘ sent by spam like automated tweets is about as far as many go in promoting their hard work.

This is in no way a negative reflection on Bookbuzzr, Smashwords and like sites as they provide excellent free tools for authors to promote themselves. It is simply that authors seem to be generally quite hopeless at using these tools or reading the instructions. (I would however like these book promotion sites to change their default tweeting services to eliminate this spam like material as it has a very negative impact.)

If you need proof, go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in the phrase ‘Check out my book’. You will see what I mean about hopeless and repetitive spam like marketing.

(3) Any stigma associated with POD books is for others and hypocritically not associated with an ‘indie’ author’s own book. This is an odd point, because I don’t see that readers see a stigma attached to a book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble that has the publisher listed as CresteSpace or Lulu. The stigma is perhaps perpetuated by authors with a lack of self belief in self-publishing.

(4) Self publishing could become a self fulfilling prophecy of doom if self interest, hypocrisy, and spam like marketing stay as the norm. The real question is this.

Do ‘indie’ authors yet believe in their own market, and will they take a positive and responsible attitude to marketing and promoting the self-publishing industry as a whole?



As an addendum to this post, I asked Bookbuzzr for their reaction to my comments above. They were kind enough to make the following comments:


Thank you so much for giving us a heads-up about your upcoming article.

While it mildly criticizes the book-tweeting service built into BookBuzzr, overall, it does provide positive coverage for BookBuzzr. Thank you for this.

I do want to clarify just two points:

1. The Book Tweeting service is intended to provide an additional layer of promotion for authors on twitter that are already providing significant value to their followers. In other words, if you are an author on Twitter and are already engaging in a conversation with others on Twitter, and if the Book Tweeting service sends a tweet once every few days, then it's likely to not be considered spam. However, if an author does nothing else but set up their book-tweeting service to send out tweets, then that author will be having a serious problem and will lose followers.

2. Also, the book tweeting service is something that can be turned on or off by authors. In fact there are three separate settings inside the Book Tweeting service of BookBuzzr from which the author can choose. Most technology (such as email auto-responders, mass SMS sending services, fax, cellphones, Facebook etc.) can be used for good or can be misused. Many of our authors appear to be using the service correctly (in effect, the vast majority of them send out a number of informative or entertaining tweets interspersed with automated tweets from BookBuzzr.) A few others need to be educated about how to use twitter in general and the BookBuzzr Book Tweeting service in particular. We will spend some time in creating guidelines to educate authors and also think about how we can spam-proof the technology.

Again, we appreciate you involving us in this article.

Ranga
Author Success Manager
www.BookBuzzr.com
World's # 1 Free, Online Book-Marketing Technology for Authors




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And The Winner Is ……

Publishing a book has become easier in recent years due to self-publishing alternatives such as vanity publishing, print-on-demand and e-books. The abundance of on-line publishers and stores seems to grow almost daily.

So is it a viable alternative to traditional publishing? This really depends on your outlook and goals as an author. If you suffer badly from continual rejection, then self-publishing will certainly be better for your morale. In the end though, it really is about selling books. And lots of them. This is where traditional publishers and their marketing advantages truly come into play. The resources at their disposal are enormous, and justifiably, they need to make money out of your book to recoup these costs. So it has to be marketable. Hence the number of rejections from hopeful authors.

Even if you are fortunate enough to be signed by a publisher, remember that they will also want your ‘pound of flesh’ from you to promote the book and your royalties per copy will be quite small. So you and your publisher both have to sell a lot of books to make money.

On the other hand, your profit per book is much higher as a self-publisher so you don’t need to sell as many books. But here’s the catch. You have to do ALL of the marketing work yourself. Not only this, but also the editing, proof reading, cover design, typography and general management of your title. As a rule of thumb, I say that all of this extra work accounts for about three times the amount of time I spent writing the book.

Then you have another choice. Will you also publish an e-book version? With Apple now entering the market, the next year or so may prove to be interesting. It’s worth mentioning that this involves more work for you as the formatting for an e-book is totally different from the printed version, and is very time consuming. Just add a few more days work here.

So who will win this new book battle? Books or e-books? Big publishers or self-publishers? Lastly I suppose. Do you want to be in the contest?

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Why Self Publish

The book publishing industry has been turned on its head in recent years with the advent of easily accessible and economical choices which enables authors to self publish their works. Added to this has been the rapid increase in the popularity of e-books.

This is not to say that self publishing is the easy path to fame and fortune, as there are many hurdles, obstacles and traps that await the inexperienced. However, as an author it does open up an avenue that was unavailable a few years ago. For me, I knew I had three choices when I wanted to publish my first book.

I could submit my pitch and manuscript to any number of literary agents and publishers and hope that one may just possibly be interested enough to contact me. As any writer knows, this route needs a thick skin as rejections are frequent, and being totally ignored is even more frequent. Then, if you are successful in finding a publisher, your works are then fully controlled by them.

The second route available was vanity publishing. This is where you as an author pay for the publishing of your work, and of course accept the financial risks involved. All marketing and distribution is your responsibility as well, so it requires a substantial financial outlay.

Then lastly was self publishing. Commonly called POD (Print on demand) now. I was hesitant at first as I have many years experience in the printing industry and POD always had a quality downside. But in recent years technology has improved to the point where it is almost impossible to tell the difference between an offset printed or POD produced book.

In the end I chose self publishing because firstly it offered a quality product at a very reasonable per unit cost and did not require a large financial outlay up front. Secondly because of the distribution channels available, including e-book delivery. And thirdly because I retain my independence and control over my work. The down side is that I am responsible for all editing, proofing, design and marketing of my books.

Every author will make different choices, but at least now there are choices and this can only be good writers.

The one issue of concern on the horizon though is one of price. Are we going to see a repetition of what happened to the music industry? Free e-books are making their way into the mainstream market now via large publishers wishing to gain a foothold in the e-book market. While this is legitimate, I worry about copying and sharing of e-books, which we all know affected the music industry very badly.

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Ten Golden Rules Of Successful Writing

For those of you who are either contemplating becoming an author, or those writers who want to get to the bestseller status fast, I thought I would share what I believe to be the ten prime factors for success. Some are highly technical while others require hours and hours of practice and perfection, but I am sure you will see the benefits very quickly from following my Ten Golden Rules For Successful Writing And Getting People To Buy Your Books.

1. Always include blank pages at the back of the book. this makes the book thicker, so looks like better value.

2. Be consistent with spelling mistakes. The reader’s brain will adjust.

3. Always dedicate your book to your mother. This increase the ‘Awwww’ factor, and also gives you an opportunity to include another blank pager after it.

4. If you have a long name, change it. Bestselling authors must restrict both their names to five letters or less.

5. If you are under fifty, do not put a photo of yourself on the back cover. Writers must look mature.

6. Use a lot of dialogue. It takes up more page space. (Helps point one) Narrative tends to be in good solid paragraphs, so stay clear on neat economical space saving paragraphs as much as possible.

7. Get your very best friend, wife or sibling to write the blurb for the back of your book.

8. Use short and simple words. Long words reduce your market potential to only those readers with high IQs.

9. Always start a sentence with a Capital Letter, and try to remember the full stop at the end. It helps readers navigate better.

10. Make sure you have some sort of story to tell. Three hundred pages of:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, sapien platea morbi dolor lacus nunc, nunc ullamcorper. Felis aliquet egestas vitae, nibh ante quis quis dolor sed mauris. Erat lectus sem ut lobortis, adipiscing ligula eleifend, sodales fringilla mattis dui nullam. Ac massa aliquet Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, sapien platea morbi dolor lacus nunc, nunc ullamcorper. Felis aliquet egestas vitae, nibh ante quis quis dolor sed mauris. Erat lectus sem ut lobortis, adipiscing ligula eleifend, sodales fringilla mattis dui nullam. Ac massa aliquet
has proven not to sell very well, even though it does speed up writing a lot.

Bonus Rule: Always include a 404 page not found link to help readers get back to where they were.

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Should I Write For Free?

A very simple blog post for me today. Just a copy of today’s best selling Fiction & Literature on Amazon. Check the number of free books in the list. Then the number of Kindle books. Then look at number 10. The first real book in the list.

The next real book appears at number 20 then at 29.

Of the top 50 best selling books, 21 books are free Kindle books. Now, I don’t want to be seen as a party pooper here, but since when can a FREE BOOK be a BEST SELLER? It hasn’t been sold. It’s a give away.

It seems clear to me. Write for free and only publish electronically.

So, now I can only hope my local supermarket joins in the fun and has food for free too!































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Why Write?

While very few will become as famous or as well known as Stephen King, Dan Brown or JK Rowlings, that does not stop of from us writing. I would imagine there are millions of us who write. Well at least more than just a few emails or a dear diary entry every day.

My definition of a writer is someone who just can’t help themselves and has to record something in words every day. Whether it be part of a large project such as a novel or non-fiction work, or perhaps a regular blog or article writing. The other definition would have to be that you do not earn a fixed or regular income from your passion. Perhaps you may be lucky and sell some of your books, but at the end of the day it is a labour of love.

So why do we do it? For me it is quite simple I suppose. I write primarily for my own enjoyment and personal expression. Not being guided by anyone else, I write as I want, in a style I like or feel like experimenting with and am free to choose my subject matter. Another reason would have to be that I have aways wanted to be an artist, but my paintings and drawings were crap, so I had to find another outlet.

Do I write only for my myself? No, not at all. I certainly want people to read what I write, but I am not driven by having to please a certain market segment. I write to entertain, inform, provoke and hopefully express an idea worthy of more than two seconds of superficial thought. But I don’t write with an initial sense of wanting to please or pander to a certain reader group. Read here vampires for instance. Just can’t do it.

So in the end, my writing is the same as so many others. A passion and ingrained daily habit. There remains of the course the extremely minimal chance of being ‘discovered’ (should I have written exploited instead?), and becoming an ‘overnight success’ after thirty years of hard work. But that really is in the realms of winning the lottery, therefore on we plod. Pen (keyboard) and passion hand in hand.

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