Nick Bryan

self-pub

The Man Who Tweeted Plugs – Last Stop Before Publication Junction

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The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf, my first effort in self-publishing books, emerges on Tuesday into the world of ereaders! The cover is off to the right, and if you want even more details, review opportunities and the like, this blog post has you covered.

But if you’re interested in some project news, or in what sort of thing fills the days of a man when his book is on the verge of people-powered publishing, here’s the latest update. Probably the last major one before release day. Includes video content. Gasp. Best read on.

Let the internet be your robot butler

First up, because I gotta sell books somehow so should put these in before anyone loses interest. You can now pre-order the book on a couple of e-outlets, in case you want to make sure it appears on your device ASAP.

Here are those links:

And that’s it for now. Makes it all seem pretty real, eh?

Start the presses!

Still only the ebook versions coming out next Tuesday, but progress continues on the print edition, which is going to be lovely. I’ve approved the back cover and the proof version is scheduled to arrive with me a week or so after the ebook comes out.

So, in the event I haven’t fucked up substantially, I’ll hopefully be able to approve that and get that up for your ordering pleasure as well. Or, if there are major mistakes, alas we must wait another two weeks.

But yes, print fans, it is coming. I would’ve waited until both were good to go, but I wanted to make sure I had the e-version launched for when I went to Nine Worlds in a few weeks. If everything goes flawlessly, we may have both for that. Score.

My card, anyone?

I have new business cards for the book release! Not overly exciting for you maybe, but I just wanted to show off the design I did for the back because I think it came out quite well – it’s just above this section. The front is the book cover. Come and say hello at Nine Worlds and I may give you one of these cards.

A series writer’s work is never done

So, amid all this admin, I’ve managed to find some writing time! And what am I working on? Well, among other things, the Hobson & Choi Case Two book edition!

After all, the big thing they told me at London Book Fair was to keep building up the series, so I’d best crack on. Coming to you… either late 2014 or early 2015, hopefully. It’s scary how fast time disappears with these big projects.

And that, I suppose, is that. Depending on time and inspiration, I may not blog again until publication day. Get your two pounds ready folks, it’s gonna be good.

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – Hobson & Choi: Case One! Cover! Blurb! Release date!

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So. In the not-too-distant future, the first case of Hobson & Choi, my mismatched detective duo London crime series with a darkly comic tone, will be self-publishing. I have a nice cover, a sales blurb-type-thing, a new title, a release date, and I am about to declare all of those things.

Exciting stuff. Probably best to just get on with it. First up, then, is the real meat: cover and blurb time.

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf

“If we get 400 followers, John Hobson will solve that nasty wolf-murder case for free! Fight the thing himself if he has to! #HobsonVsWolf!”

Angelina Choi was only trying to drum up some Twitter followers and make a good impression on her first day interning at John Hobson’s one-man detective agency.

But the campaign went viral and now they have a murder to solve, no money coming in, and an unwilling Hobson faced with battling some enormous beast.

With both follower and body counts rising, can they crack the case without offending everyone or being eaten by a huge dog?The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is the first case starring Hobson & Choi, a bickering, mismatched detective duo for 21st century London. This book collects the debut storyline of the hit darkly comic crime web serial, extensively rewritten and improved for this definitive edition.

Also included: book-exclusive bonus story The Left Hand Is Always Right, grim tale from a dark corner of Hobson & Choi’s London – The Left Hand, budget pub of crime.

The What-When-How

So, that’s the what. Next important bit of news, I suppose, is when: The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf will be out on Tuesday July 22nd 2014 in electronic formats. It might take a day or two to get through to all of them, but I’m aiming to be up on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, iBooks and whatever else Smashwords will punt me onto.

For print users, there is a standard paper edition coming in August just as soon as I’ve finished back-and-forthing with proofs. Rest assured, I’ll try my best to make a big deal out of that too.

“But what about me, Nick?”

If you want to get involved now, The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is up on Goodreads so you can add it to your to-read list and such. Also, if you have a book-review blog or enjoy posting reviews on Amazon/Goodreads/anywhere else book reviews are posted (or both of the above), email me and I may be able to sort out a proof e-copy of the book for consideration in truthful review.

In a similar vein, if you have a blog/other outlet and want to get even more involved, I am well up for talking about the release anywhere that will have me. For discussion of guest posts etc, just email me. I’m sure we can work out some kind of fair arrangement.

And if you want some new H&C material right the hell now, you can still get a complete two-thousand word done-in-one (not part of this book, an entirely standalone new thing) by signing up to my mailing list here or via the form which should appear in the right sidebar of this blog. This will, as you may have guessed, guarantee you an email when I publish The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf.

That’s probably it for now – if I’ve missed any crucial details, let me know in whatever medium pleases you. For now, let’s just take another look at the cover in attractive 3D-rendered form. Thanks to Design For Writers for their lovely work on the actual design, by the way – do contact them if you need anything similar, they’re good.

Doin’ HTML Till The Break Of Dawn – Technical Self-Publishing Time

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MAXIMUM HTML

I have been locked in my room at my tiny corner desk, working on the process of turning my upcoming self-published book into beautiful HTML. It has taken a long time. I can neither confirm nor deny that I was up at 4AM Thursday morning, listening to the birds tweeting outside (and, for once, not tweeting much myself) working on exciting tasks such as reinserting italics.

As you may gather from this nuts-and-bolts self-pub stuff, the day of the Hobson & Choi release is getting very close now. So close, in fact, that I may put the cover up next week, announce the title, blurb, maybe even a date. I’m 90% sure that will happen.

But for now, here’s a blog post about the experience of processing a book into HTML. This is not a walkthrough, because there are plenty of those and I don’t have sufficient advice to justify bringing another one into the world. The posts I used to guide me was this one by Guido Henkel, it’s pretty comprehensive.

Hyper Tricky

First and foremost: yes, turning a whole book into HTML by hand is very boring and fiddly. To be honest, If I didn’t already have a basic working knowledge of the language from my day job in IT and working on various online projects, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. And if I had, it would have taken an eternity and come out terribly.

Having said that, it is not impossible. Even if I do have an advantage by writing on a comparatively short book (approx 50,000 words), it can be done without giving over weeks of your life. Yes, you will eventually need to trawl through your entire document for something and it will be dull, but the clever use of find/replace gets you a lot of the way. That Henkel walkthrough contains a lot of top tips in that direction.

In my case, my undoing was the em-dash/dash distinction and also the repeated tweaks to how I styled chapter-heads. In fact, you know what was the biggest pain? Persuading the table of contents to work in all formats. I only included it as a bonus anyway, I’m not sure fictional books really need one. C’est la vie, readers.

Still, I’m determined to take a stab at competing with other ebooks, and doubt an automated Word conversion was going to do it. Which meant either paying someone to do a decent conversion or launching into HTML myself.

Those of you with unlimited budgets and a hatred of technical nitpicking should definitely get someone else to do it for you. You’re not any more or less of an author if you can’t do HTML, after all. Much like I didn’t do my own cover design because I’m not a graphic designer.

(My cover design is great, by the way. Excited to blog it up next week.)

Mind-your Language

But for those of us who into this shit, there’s something weirdly fulfilling about building something and seeing it slowly take shape. It’s not dissimilar to the writing process itself, only much quicker and with the added perk of specific instructions and an easy way to determine whether you’ve succeeded.

And I think I’ve done okay, although this is my first time through, alright? So if I end up finding some enormous mistake when I go live and it turns into A Storm Of Stress, I reserve the right to recant this positive tone and start using phrases like “living motherfucking nightmare”.

For now, though, this feels like a moment of calm. A brief pause between the worries of “Oh god, have I done enough editing?” and the later panic of “Oh god, is anyone going to buy it now?”

So that’s nice. I can save loads of money on holidays in the future by just giving myself massive amounts of HTML to edit, can’t I? I’ve already got plans to do the second H&C volume in the not-too-distant future, so don’t worry, I’ve got plenty to do. Please do not send me your HTML parsing tasks – unless you are willing to pay for my time, in which case absolutely get in touch.

I think we’ve covered my emotions about HTML editing in enough detail to keep even the keenest of web-therapists happy. Join me next week for more hard facts about the release. Exciting, eh?

Becoming An Internet Author – Week One

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The slow but determined march towards Hobson & Choi self-publication continues. A few days ago, I blogged a little about receiving professional edits on the text and my feelings on same. I think I reached equilibrium by the end, and I’m relatively okay with the direction it’s going.

However, there is obviously another side to the whole thing. If I’m self-publishing (or author-publishing or hybrid-authoring or whatever), I obviously have to do all my own promotion. Well, I’m hoping some good reviews will do a bit of the work for me, but I still have to get the book to some reviewers.

All of which means doing some tweeting, some blogging, some awkward-for-me self-advertising. Talking about myself. Becoming an Internet Author. Never mind my damn edits, how do I feel about that?

Fixed Books In Time – Even the Doctor can’t save us!

I do a little promotion for my stuff now, but it helps that I’m generally linking to recently updated items – a new post on this site, a Hobson & Choi update on Jukepop or whatever TV review I’ve recently scribed. The trouble with books – damn them – is that they’re pretty static.

Once the self-published volume goes up into the world, probably some time in July, I will need to keep plugging despite it remaining identical, no matter how self-conscious I feel about repeatedly mentioning a fixed point in time. Think I finally understand why they make Doctor Who so uncomfortable.

Still, there are thousands of authors in the world, self and traditionally published, and at least a few seem to get along without all their friends and internet followers deserting them. It must be possible. Just try and keep the ratio of ramble-to-promo strong. Don’t let the plugs get too dry and generic.

I’ll probably attempt at least some form of giveaway/competition once the book is out, so stay tuned if you want to get involved with winning stuff. It seems a nice way of doing a plug without boringly begging.

#MildyAmusing #Subheading

Aside from that, trying to improve this website. Make it clearer, more visually appealing and buy-my-stuff orientated.

Of course, anyone who has the words “writer” in their Twitter bio has probably been followed by a lot of random authors with a massive amount of followers, suspiciously similar number of people they follow, thousands of tweets about their book and almost nothing else.

To be honest, when I overthink myself to death about becoming an Internet Author, I’m mostly worrying about doing that. But only we can control our own destiny, etc. Most likely going to continue making poo jokes on social media even when I have a book published. I am a human being, not a wares-push-bot, and I’m pretty sure not everyone who follows me on Twitter is even that bothered whether I have a book out or not. Hopefully my fellow human people respect that I genuinely like what I’ve produced and am just trying to get along without being a pain in the arse.

Oh, and I might resist the urge to use ten million #hashtags as well. I kinda feel talking about your #book on the #kindle #ereader in the #crime genre might be too vague to get any traction? Correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.

But if anyone wants to try and get #HobsonVsWolf trending, that’d help me a great deal. (Little injoke for Hobson & Choi readers there…)

Receiving my first set of edits – A Psychological Journey

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So, the ongoing plunge towards Hobson & Choi self-publication continues. I sent my manuscript of Book One off to an editor, because if my trip to London Book Fair taught me one thing, it’s that you gotta let someone else loose on it.
After all, I’m competing with an array of authors who have editors, I’m bothering to get a decent cover done, so I might as well make sure the insides are up to scratch.

With that goal in mind, I got my book back from the editor about a week ago, and have just blasted through the whole lot of edits once, making changes accordingly. It’s a strange experience, getting edited for the first time, and even after chatting to other people beforehand, it’s still… interesting.

Denial

A lot of writers say that when they first get professional feedback on their work from a professional editor or agent (or perhaps other professionals such as doctors, lawyers and accountants), they hear the bad parts and their first response is to admit: “Yes… yes, I knew all along, I was just hoping I was wrong.”

Are they telling the truth, or do they want to sound like they know what they’re doing?

I don’t know about others, but I can tell you that I totally knew everything all along, and the feedback from my editor served only to echo my own genius back at me.

Ahem.

Acceptance

To be honest, as edits go, I probably had a fairly easy ride. Lots of good feedback about my actual story, characters, pace, etc, but quite a lot of language stuff. To be precise: I sometimes over-narrate, which is something I’m aware of, but apparently need to chop more thoroughly.

Long story short, a fair chunk of over-elaborate narration to be cut, got a few new additions to compensate. The main problem, to be honest, is that a lot of fun observations or witty jokes tend to be buried in internal narration, and in removing that to avoid over-telling things, I also lose some good turns of phrase.

All comes back to that whole Killing Your Darlings thing again, doesn’t it? I love these words, and some can be salvaged with a move to dialogue, but many will simply need to die.

Bargaining

I struggled with it for a bit, to be honest. Even wondered whether me and the editor were well matched – all the time aware that I was probably just being precious. Part of me feels that the very close third person narrative, including inner thoughts and fun character theorising, is a big part of the style, and by chopping it back, I lose a bit of the fun.

On the other hand… it does read better now. A lot smoother. I’ve saved a decent percentage of the jokes I really liked, and the ones that are still in narration are a lot less buried in blocks of text. We’ll see how it goes, I suppose.

So, long story short, Hobson & Choi Book One is getting alarmingly close to happening now – hopefully late July or early August. I may even get my new title and cover up here on the blog in the nearish future, and won’t that be fun?

Hobson & Choi Self-Publishing Attempt – An Early Update

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Like most of my big announcements, this one was somewhat buried in various podcasts and the London Book Fair blog post a month ago, so here it is up top: I am planning Hobson & Choi self-published editions, collecting the series storyline-by-storyline, with proper covers, editing, extra material and general joy.

The first of these should be out in the summer, for both e-readers and paper-readers. The second… hopefully by the end of the year, but that could end up being optimistic.

So, as I embark on this adventure, I thought I’d blog about it a little. These will be on an irregular basis rather than every week, as there won’t always be anything to report. And yes, it is taking a fuckton of willpower to not call this Self-Pub Update #1 and start numbering them, but I’ve only just made myself stop doing that with the writing blogs. Must be strong.

Anyway. How’s it going with the self-publishing, Nick?

EDITS EDITS EDITS

I’ll spare you lengthy descriptions of my editing process, as that’s another thing you can get extensively in other posts. Suffice to say, the knowledge this will be going public in the near future does focus the mind. After I went to all those self-pub seminars at London Book Fair, it became clear that editing perhaps wasn’t something I should do all by myself.

After all, I wrote Hobson & Choi, edited it before publishing to Jukepop, yet again before recording the podcasts, did another pass recently to get it into a book-shape with longer, more substantial chapters. I’m fairly close to this material. I know it better than I know the back of my hands, because I stare straight pass my limbs to the monitor. See picture to left for an illustrated metaphor of how my hands are kept in darkness by the shining glory behind them.

So, as everyone advised in the seminars, I engaged the service of an actual editor. Sent the manuscript off to them a week or so back, and the moment I get it back and have to face their opinions is one thing I’ll definitely blog about here. I’m only a little scared.

But the story needs to be the best it can be, I gotta compete with not just other self-pubs but traditionally published authors who get editorial feedback from agents and/or publishers. Mustn’t do this half-arsed, no matter how much my bank account sometimes wants me to.

MORE MORE MORE

As mentioned up top, we have extra material, to entice fans of the original serial into picking up the book anyway. This takes the form of an extra short story, set in the Hobson & Choi universe (well, it’s mostly one city so far) and expanding on some minor characters. To be precise, it takes place behind the scenes in the criminal pub The Left Hand.

This story exists in second draft form and I’m pretty pleased with it. Hopefully I’ll become even happier as edits continue. And in terms of providing even more value to existing readers: it’s entirely possible these editors will tear my text apart so much, it’ll basically be a whole new story.

JUDGE A BOOK BY THIS

Lastly (for now), the other thing I decided I shouldn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t do myself: making a cover for the book. Not that the existing H&C cover (on the right there) hasn’t served me well, but I don’t know shit about graphic design.

So I commissioned the nice people at Design For Writers, and it looks like we’ve got something. They come highly recommended if you’re after a book cover. It was a tough process at times and I needed to make intimidating decisions, including a new title for the whole first storyline (eek), but I think we’re there.

Which means I get to pull off one of those cover reveals all the cool self-pub authors do. I’m going to put it off for a few weeks, because we’re still months out from actually publishing, but trust me, it’s worth it. Or get me a drink and I’ll probably show you on my phone.

Don’t have to wait for me to drink the drink, I’ll happily give it up just in exchange for a pint existing.

Signing Off…

So that’s where we are with the Hobson & Choi self-publishing project. More updates will follow when something else tangibly happens. Questions? Worries? Suggestions for my marketing strategy? Comment below!