subversive ramblings 0

Changes to what I’ll be writing about on THIS blog

Nigel — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:58:19 +0000

Adam Warner and I are moving our plans steadily towards launching the new publishing business.

Our web site is now up and running, though not perfect. Let us know what you think. It’s at http://www.adelpublishing.co.uk .

And I’m now writing a second blog which is for readers, writers and anyone interested in how publishing is changing. It’s at http://www.adelpublishing.co.uk/blog/ . Please check it out, and comment.

This means all the stuff about writing and publishing will be on the new blog.

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Growing old: good bit #1: how I perceive the world

Nigel — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:38:21 +0000

I doubt anyone wants to get old. I don’t mind being more experienced, hopefully wiser, but would love a younger body. Ah well, there are compensations.

Something I’ve increasingly been noticing over the past couple of years is how much more I’m appreciating the sights and sounds around me. This morning we drove over from Leeds to Wetherby. Done the drive hundreds of times. I should know the scenery by heart, and on a dull, drizzly day in January there should have been nothing to excite my eyes, but there was.

Obviously I had to keep my eyes on the road most of the time, but when I know the road’s clear with no potential hazards for at least ten seconds ahead I risk glancing to either side. Not like in the movies, where the driver turns his whole head and stares for several seconds, and you think, I’m glad I’m not on the same road as this idiot. Just a fraction of a second, not turning my head much.

Grey sky, washed out colours, bare trees, but the fields either side of the road looked great. I really enjoyed the drive. Having Jenny with me helped of course

Several times I wanted to stop the car and take some photos, but we were running late for Jenny’s social meeting.

Why is this happening?

It might be to do with the way chronic depression tends to burn itself out once you reach your 60s (I’ll do a future post on that), but that’s only part of it. My depression is almost always worst in the winter months. This year’s depression is the worst for some years (I know why, but needn’t bother you with it). So I should be seeing everything in sad shades of grey, dripping with cold rain, whipped by raw winds. But I’m not.

So what’s happening?

Probably several factors.

1. I’m now retired. I haven’t stopped doing stuff, but the alarm no longer kicks my head at 5.40 every weekday morning. I don’t have nightmares the last few nights before each term starts. Stress doesn’t build up through each term until I’m struggling to mark exams and get reports written while the pupils are getting feisty as they wait for the holidays to start. I don’t have long teacher holidays through most of which I can hardly do anything because I’m so tired and stressed. And I don’t bring marking home after a hard day at work. Mind you I found retirement very hard at first. To misquote Dickens, teaching is the best job in the world, and the worst.

To sum that up: I’ve lost most of the stress of full-time work.

It was making me physically ill. It was feeding my depression, draining the colour from scenery and the taste from food.

2. I’m a guy, and by my age the hormonal balance is shifting a bit. I no longer feel I have to drive at the maximum safe speed (or faster). I don’t need to compete with all the other guys to prove I’m the best. At last I am able to slow things down and start enjoying the journey of life.

If you’re over 60, how are you finding things now?

(Photo: © Péter Gudella | Dreamstime.com )

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Growing Old: and the party

Nigel — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:52:58 +0000

We’ve been invited to a New Year’s Eve party this evening.

It doesn’t involve much effort being next door.

But you know what they say about knowing you’re middle-aged when offered the choice of two evenings out you pick the one that gets you home earliest.

Do I feel like I’ll enjoy it? No.

Will I enjoy it? Yes.

In fact when you have to push me there in a wheelchair and check my hearing aid is turned on I’ll still enjoy it.

So long as I don’t get home too late lol.

(Photo © Michael Flippo | Dreamstime.com )

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Growing old: time for the givers to receive?

Nigel — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:10:01 +0000

We have a friend, now in her seventies, who has devoted her life to other people. Her working life was spent in Africa (mainly Kenya) with her husband and family. They built their own home, then built a hospital. He was a medic, and ably ran the hospital. She set up a small school.

When they returned to England and settled in Leeds, she continued to care for a wide range of people. She carried a thermos of soup with her when walking in town so that she could offer practical help to any homeless person she met. She ran English classes for immigrants. She has given us much help over the years.

We love her very much, and now we are more settled we want to help her. She is becoming frail, her memory isn’t what it used to be, her ability to cook for large numbers of guests has weakened. We worry for her safety as she cycles round Leeds. But it is hard for her to accept from other people the cheerful help she has spent her life giving.

Recently I mentioned this to her. I also dared to say that we found it upsetting that she sometimes refused offers of help, that she was denying us the pleasures of giving something back to her.

“It’s hard,” she said, “but I’ll try to let people help me more.”

It is hard to change the habits of a lifetime.

Perhaps what we should do is from the start teach ourselves to receive graciously as well as give.

(Photo copyright Serif Images)

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Growing Old: sharing life and a mince pastry

Nigel — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:57:15 +0000

It’s nearly Christmas and Tesco have started offering cut-price ‘puff pastry mince-pies’. They’re beautiful, alarmingly more-ish, and taste somewhere between a croissant and a danish. Tesco bake them fresh on the premises and there are four in a pack. And there are two of us, which even I can figure is two each. Two each if you think life is about balancing the books.

I suggested cutting the last one in half so we could enjoy it together and Jenny said, ‘No, I’ve had my two.’ This kind of puzzled me. Yes, of course I knew what she meant, but I couldn’t see what it had to do with sharing a mince-pie.

Over the decades we’ve given so much to each other. Certainly we’ve received as well, but what really works in marriage, and in life, is giving and sharing. It would have given me more pleasure to share the last mince-pie with Jenny than have it all to myself. (Actually when I felt like that remaining pie later I completely forgot about Jenny and ate the lot. Guess I must be human ).

What has this got to do with having a life in old age?

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Good books: what does a good publisher really contribute?

Nigel — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:43:27 +0000

Yesterday I downloaded samples of a couple of novels for my Kindle, and with some excitement began to read.

The Amazon site indicated the ideas and plots would be great. The novels could indeed have been great, but for me they weren’t. I guess next time I’ll be checking that a novel has been published by someone other than the author, because then it’s far more likely to have involved someone else with experience and no emotional attachment to the book giving it a thorough criticism. As one reviewer said: ’… this book could have done with a stiff editing (along with proof reading).’

Both novels are good for early attempts, but frankly they’re not ready for market. They may or may not sell in plenty but they could have been so much better, and the authors could have learned so much from the experience. In the old days a publisher might have taken one of these writers on, assigned the right editor to work with them, and achieved both these objectives before going to print. These days almost all publishers would read a few pages and decide the amount of work developing the author was more than they could afford to invest.

Since we’ll be looking for writers early in their careers who both write the kind of stuff we enjoy, and want to work at improving at their craft, perhaps I should go into some details. These comments sadly apply to many of the self-published novels I’ve looked at in recent years, and no, I’m not going to give names because these guys have worked really hard to achieve what they have. I don’t want to discourage them. If they stick at it and listen to criticism they will improve. And bear in mind that authors who appear to have overnight success with their ‘first’ novel have probably written at least half a million words before that novel – it just didn’t get published. As Malcolm Gladwell identified, to be great at anything you need to invest at least 10,000 hours.

Here are some of the mistakes new writers often make:

1. Far too many ad-s

We start by thinking our writing will be more vivid if we use loads of adjectives and adverbs, but actually the reverse is true. We need to consider fully the nouns and verbs we select. When you finish your novel, what you have is a first draft. Part of the redrafting process is to go through sentence by sentence and remove all the unnecessary words. It’s painful, but it’s necessary.

2. The writing jerks

This is something to look for during an early edit. We want the reader to flow through our narrative as if we weren’t there in the background writing it. Anything that acts like a pothole in the road should be removed, or rewritten, or something. How sentences and paragraphs are structured matters, and getting it right requires work.

3. The story rambles

Some authors like Iain Banks get away with breaking all the rules. The rest of us need to grab our reader’s attention within a few pages, and hold it. Introducing characters, locations and plot, yes, of course this is important, and of course we must avoid confusing the reader (except where that’s part of the plot). But we have to give them some reason to WANT to keep reading, and for most of us writers that means we have to get on with the story. We need to provide a reason to care about our characters and locations!

4. Far too much telling

Please, please, please, please, please stop TELLING me things. I want to be shown, not told. Yes, this is a very complex skill to learn, but during your edits be sure to grab any section which is just explanatory and figure out a way to use your reader’s senses. Show us.

I recall a documentary about Steve McQueen in which he emphasised this, and illustrated by showing a film clip. I forget the film, but he was seated on a bed in a shared room holding the balsa-wood framework of a model airplane he must have been working on for weeks. His face began to show anger and frustration, and then, slowly at first, then with frenzy, he crumpled and destroyed the plane. You could FEEL his emotion. Yet he said not a word.

5. Cut stuff

The author feels a need to describe scenes fully, but actually that’s impossible. Read some Dickens, or Hardy, or Steinbeck, or even Banks. Their descriptions are sometimes brief and sometimes extensive, but they’re always selective. A starting point is to insist that everything you describe is there for a purpose, so ask yourself: is this bit of description needed to help create important aspects of character or plot? If not, cut it out. Does this scene contribute anything important to the story? If not, cut it out. Yes, I know it’s painful. You’ve lovingly written it. Junking it feels liking giving up your child for adoption. But in reality you will be honing your writing and improving your novel.

That’ll do for now because those were the five things that struck me about the novels I tried yesterday, and those are key aspects we intend to help authors improve. It really is invaluable to have an editor you trust who will, frankly, rip your novel apart for you.

PEOPLE MATTER MORE … and our authors will matter a great deal to us. We want them to be friends and partners. They matter. So we will be honest about their early drafts.

The picture? I’d love to have got into hang-gliding, but if I’d tried it I’d have made sure to get expert guidance, and I’d have listened carefully to any criticism from my instructor.

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Why am I growing old?

Nigel — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:53:00 +0000

It’s dead easy to grow old. You just have to wait.

But it’s also very difficult. Too much is changing in ways you’d rather not experience. It’s a new period of life with new and not that pleasant phases to it.

In fact although I’m only 62 I’ve been through times when I felt quite angry about the whole affair, and other times when I felt totally lost, so I thought I’d start recording how I deal with this fresh season of life.

So why am I growing old?

Because I was born, and had a life, and still have life.

And there is still much to enjoy, and much to look forward to.

I used to do an incredible amount of running, climbing, and hill-walking. Recently I’ve not been well enough to do any of these. At first it was my lower back which started to hurt whenever I ran. Then the stress of teaching coupled with lifetime chronic depression to make me too ill to be able to do much of anything. Then I got ME (chronic fatigue syndrome) after a bout of flu. Overall it wasn’t fun.

My body is getting older. I can’t run more than a few yards – can’t walk far either yet – and most of the rock climbs I’ve enjoyed would require far more strength, stamina, and flexibility than I’m ever likely to have again.

BUT…

… I am learning to live in the present, to treasure the past, and not to fear the future.

I can recall the pleasure of a particular 10 mile route I sometimes chose for Sunday afternoons in the seventies. There were open fields, villages, the aroma of a pine forest.

I can feel once more the excitement of completing a classic climb up a north-facing cliff in the Lake District. The views down Ennerdale were magnificent even though we were climbing in the shade. Every climbing trick I knew was needed somewhere on the route. I had good company (Mark Blomfield). And I can still experience the thrill of completing that last move and emerging into bright sunshine on the summit plateau of Great Gable. What a day.

And those experiences are still a part of me. They contributed to who I am now. The feelings are still available.

And the truly exciting aspect is that I don’t need to repeat them.

Yes, it would be nice to have a young body again, but there’s so much of those phases of life I wouldn’t want to have to go through again. There are many mistakes I’d rather not repeat.

There was an old guy who expressed feelings about aging really well. He’d been King for a long time, and he’d usually (though not always) been a wise King, an incredibly wise King. A few of his thoughts over the decades have been preserved. Here are snippets from his third collection:

Everything is meaningless …
Everything is wearisome beyond description. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied …
For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven,
A time to be born and a time to die.

Part of life, if you’re fortunate enough to live that long, is the season of realising you are growing old and that the time to die is approaching. I’m coming to understand it is no more a season to be dreaded than any other. It is just different, and a natural part of life.

I know many people find growing old to be sometimes very tough indeed, so I’ll try to say more over the coming months that may encourage and possibly even help us.

By the way, those quotations are from Ecclesiastes chapter 1 verses 2 and 8, then chapter 3 verses 1-2.

[Legal bit: Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.]

I took the photo in Roundhay Park, Leeds, UK, in the autumn of 2009. Some of the trees are very old, and we love them. Leaves are dying, but remain beautiful. And the lady on the left is my beloved wife Jenny, who walks slowly enough that I can usually catch her up after taking a photo.

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Do we need a business model? Oh yes.

Nigel — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 21:44:09 +0000

We’re not asking a bank for finance, but we do need to clarify every aspect of our planning, so yes, we do need one. But what we want like a bullet in the kneecap is a business model designed for the last century, and given how fast everything is changing we mustn’t create a strait jacket for ourselves

So what we need is a clear description of how we intend to create value, deliver that value to people, and retrieve enough of that value to enable us to keep functioning. This must be done in a way that is easy for us to understand, and fits the way we want things to be. We are slightly mad, and we’re not businessmen – yet.

I’m going to use a structure taken from Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, and 470 other people they consulted. Amazon charged me £12.93 for the book, and it’s great fun as well as solid. If you don’t mind me being rewarded for any sale then there’s a link below. If you find the stuff below at all helpful then buy the book!

This is quite a long post, for reasons that will become obvious. Go on, give it a skim! You know you want to.

The blueprint for our publishing business will have nine elements. Here’s a broad outline of where we are at the moment, with details to follow.

Customer Segments

Who will we provide value to?

We want to be multi-sided, and provide value to two distinct groups of people.

1. We want to provide a warm, personal, professional service to authors. We want them to feel valued and involved. Their ideas and needs matter. They need to get a fair slice of any cake.

2. We want to sell books (printed and electronic) to a target of 100 – 1000 people a book, and we want them to thoroughly enjoy the books, consider them great value, be amused, and be stumulated. We want them to finish one of our books which a deeper and richer understanding of life.

Of course it’s likely all our customers in the first group will also buy some of our books.

We are aiming for a number of niche markets which we haven’t yet defined properly.

And we need to clarify what type of people are in our (hate this term) target markets.

Value Propositions

Sorry, that makes it sound more complicated than it is. The question we have to ask ourselves is:

What will we be offering people in terms of products and services that will be of value to them?

The two groups described above have to be considered separately.

1. Value for authors: well, for a start and a summary, we want our authors not only to feel valued, but also to be valued, as unique individual people who matter and who are part of the team. We’ll do this by offering:

warm, personal service,
easy communication over the web, though we intend to meet up with every author we accept, and contracts will need to be posted,
guidance and encouragement in transforming what they have written (or want to write) into something that is marketable, while ensuring their voice and message are retained,
warm and professional editing, design, programming (for e-books), and marketing,
involvement and a genuine voice in the various stages of publishing: editing, copy editing, use of pictures, layout and graphic design, setting of price, publicity, marketing, and customer relations,
a share in our brand image,
involvement in future decisions about what might be worth publishing,
and a fair slice of the cake.

Question: do we ask authors to share the financial risk on each book published? Both author and publisher will be putting in a lot of time, skill and energy. Beyond that, the total financial investment per book will be probably about £250. Should we ask prospective authors to contribute half that once the product is fully ready for market? We will NOT be a vanity press – we’ll only publish stuff we believe in, but why not ask the author to share the financial risk? After all, the well known self-publishing companies would charge roughly 600% more for what we think would be an inferior product with inferior service. To us, people matter more … than money.

2. Value for readers: which is much harder to nail down. Some of it is listed above, but we need to work on clarifying this further in terms of what people will see as value before they purchase as well as afterwards.

Channels

How will we communicate with our authors and readers, and how will we deliver stuff (value) to them?

Let’s break this down into five phases, and again the analysis for our own business will be expanded later – it must be.

a) Awarenes: how do we make sure a good number of our target authors and readers know whqat we have to offer?

b) Evaluation: how do we help our authors and readers figure out if we’re offering the right value for their individual needs? How do we evaluate what may rapidly become a deluge of submissions from authors? Probably by creating a team using the web.

c) Purchase: if a potential author/reader likes what we’re offering, how do they buy in?

d) Delivery: and, obviously, how do we get our services/products delivered to our authors/readers? For authors, mainly by co-working over the web. For readers, initially via Amazon bookstore and Kindle – Kindle because it has the lion’s share of the e-book market at the moment, and anything bought for Kindle can be read on many other platforms including PC, iPad, phone. Love to go for iBooks and hig street stores too, but that’s harder.

e) After sales: every single customer matters, and we want to respond to everyone in a warm, considerate, helpful, and personal way. We’re thinking this probably requires a team of like-minded people working together over the web. Lik-minded? Agreeing that people matter more …

We can’t afford traditional paid advertising, or a paid sales force. We want our products to be so good that our customers will want to tell other people about them. Initially we plan to use partner channels and web sales.

Customer Relationships

How will we set up our systems to handle relationships with our authors and our readers?

We have four key motivations:

we need to gain customers, or we’re wasting our time (and getting pretty down),
we want existing customers to want more from us, partly because we really want our services to be that good,
we want our customers to talk about us,
we genuinely care about people as individuals, and we really want them to believe this.

If we can find the right programmer it would be incredible to be able to guide existing readers to other books they might love, and that includes books not published by us. This would need to be either automated, or driven by a community, or both. Apart from this, no, we hate the idea of automated customer responses, and we hate the idea of employing someone to the answer the phone or e-mails who isn’t a committed part of the team. And actually we’d prefer to build a community that wants to be involved. We want to be part of the community we create. We want to be part of a friendly team that creates together.

Revenue Streams

In order to keep going and to keep giving value to authors and readers we have to generate some income.

Our costs in terms of time and energy will be very high indeed, especially to start with before a community forms to help us. No problem.

Our financial costs will be extremely low compared with traditional publishers, but they exist. We’ve already invested a fair amount, and need to buy/hire the right software for producing e-books at the high standard we intend. On top of that, we need to buy ISBNs, upload each book for print-on-demand publication, pay Amazon to keep several copies in stock (people hate waiting a fortnight for their order these days), and buy 50-100 copies of each book for publicity purposes. That done, profit = income – costs. And we need to make a profit in order to share it with our authors, and provide Adam with enough income to go full time on this business.

Our books need to be priced with great care, taking into account the conflicting sales protocols of Amazon and Apple. We will use a fixed price model which encourages our partners (Amazon etc) to offer variable discounts. We’ll not charge for advertising: if something really is good then it deserves our recommendation freely given.

Key Resources

Physical: initially the business will own no physical resources, but instead make free use of hardware owned by Adam and Nigel – computer equpment, printers, ink, paper, software.

Intellectual: at present we have just three books, none of which is ready for publication.

Human: aha, yes, we’ve got that. We have the time, energy, enthusiasm, skills, and talents of Adam and Nigel. Plus friends are listening and advising.

Financial: the business has none, so we are investing some of our own money – but very little finance is needed.

Key Activities

What must we do in order to create books worth buying, make them available, publicise them, build good customer relations, and make enough money?

Partial answers are included above, but a key aspect is building a platform for our authors, a brand, a community.

Then there’s the more obvious stuff of editing, checking, design, programming, communicating, and problem solving.

Key Partnerships

We expect our most significant partners to be:

our authors, who create the books with our help,
our community, who guide us on what to publish, where to publish it, how to design it, how to price it, and so on.
Lightning Source, with their UK operation based in Milton Keynes, who provide an excellent print-on-demand service that exactly fits our plans.
Amazon, whose Kindle store is likely to be our first outlet for e-books.

We’d also love to become partners with high street bookstores, especially independent ones, but that will be a slow process. First we need to establish ourselves and our brand.

Cost Structure

There is no question that our cost structure will be value-driven. Of key importance to us are the following factors:

create an enthusiastic community that is genuinely involved,
give both authors and readers the best value we can achieve given our time and financial limitations,
customer service must be personal, thoughtful, individual, and warm.

Fixed costs: include purchase of ISBNs, initial charge by Lightning Source for each book uploaded (and for subsequent modifications), charge by Amazon for keeping copies in stock, cost of advance (free) copies to relevant people who may wish to publicise, and at least one web site. As the business develops we may need to subcontract some aspects of our work, depending who joins the team. Later there will be paying Adam salary, perhaps providing a small business premises with phone and internet access, registering annually with professional organisations, cost of new software and hardware. There will be stuff we haven’t thought of, obviously.

Core business type.

John Hagel and Marc Singer have usefully proposed and analysed three core types of business:

Product innovation
Customer relationship management
Infrastructure management

This may at first surprise you, but we fall clearly into the product innovation group. This makes sense because the other two types of business have high costs, require rapid consolidation, and the markets are dominated by a few large players. However we do overlap into customer relationship management in that we place very high value on our customers as individuals.

This is a great book and fun to read even if you don’t then set up a business. This blog will be applying the book’s ideas highly specifically to us and our publishing dreams. If you’re not us (which you aren’t) then buy the book to get the full story.

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so let’s question the direction of the world

Nigel — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:08:21 +0000

people matter more …

Life has been unfair to us.

Adam has cerebral palsy (and is a lazy git lol)

Nige has had chronic depression for 46 years (and is far too old to do anything new )

But so what?

Everyone’s disabled, everyone has tough bits to their life.

The question is, where shall we go next?

We’re looking to start a publishing business in 2012

We want to publish stuff that is different, that is fun, that is hopeful, that traditional publishers would consider far too risky.

We want to try out new ideas, and not worry if some fail. Some will.

We want to give people opportunities, and to be there to support them and root for them.

We want everyone to be part of the team, both readers and writers.

We want to get people asking the right questions about their lives.

We want people to notice each other – not the superficial things which don’t matter like the wheelchair, the bad temper, the cheap clothes, but to really notice that we’re all people.

We want you to join with us in shouting:

PEOPLE

MATTER

MORE

…

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Wrong question, wrong direction

Nigel — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:36:02 +0000

What did I do to deserve this?

It’s not fair!

Why was I born with so many problems?

It’s not fair!

Why wasn’t I born better looking, healthier, stronger?

It’s not fair!

Life hurts.

I’m too old/young.

I was born at the wrong time for a person like me.

I don’t know the right people.

If only I’d been dealt a better hand.

It’s just not fair!

But surely I’m asking the wrong questions.

I’m looking backwards instead of ahead.

I’m complaining about my disadvantages when actually we’re all disadvantaged, everyone’s disabled in some way. I just notice my problems more because they’re nearer.

It’s not fair for anybody!

Life is about accepting where we are as a given and moving on from there using the tools we do have – and every single person has good things and useful talents.

Real life is taking ourselves and the people round us and living the best we can for each other – not moaning there are problems, but doing something beautiful with what we have.

And we can only live life to the full as caring, forward-looking people living together.

Your life not fair?

Join the club.

My life is unfair too.

So what?

The question is, where shall we go next?

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