‘Absolute steal’

No, this post has nothing to do with Jack Absolute (see Friday’s Forgotten Book here). It’s simply a comment from a reviewer in one of our local newspapers here in Spain, The Coastrider.

The review is for Spanish Eye, 22 short stories about Leon Cazador, private eye, ‘in his own words’.

There’s a received wisdom that short stories don’t sell and aren’t read these days. One aspect of this is as the reviewer, Paul Mutter, explains, ‘A particular difficulty with short stories is that they are exactly that – short. All too often they can be over before they have really begun, leaving the reader somewhat frustrated.’

Happily, although Mr Mutter isn’t too keen on short stories, he enjoyed this collection – ’22 individual stories … are absolute little gems. The pace of each is perfectly judged to reach its conclusion at just the right time and in just the right way.’

He concludes, ‘Not only will the tales appeal to general lovers of short stories but in particular those with experience of living in Spain will I’m sure feel a certain resonance with these stories. My only regret is that there aren’t more of them… Leon Cazador deserves some much longer tales…. Obtained through Amazon as a paperback for £4.99 or for download as a Kindle edition for £1.99 and it is an absolute steal at that price.’

The review is here (click on the image and you'll get the full readable text):

Thank you, Mr Mutter. Your review is very much appreciated. And yes, more tales are planned, including a full-length adventure. A new Leon Cazador story is featured in the Crooked Cat's Tales (UK) here and COM here - 20 stories from Crooked Cat's authors - also at a steal of a price!

 

 

 ***

 

Spanish Eye,

featuring Leon Cazador, private eye in 22 cases
is  published by Crooked Cat Publishing
and can be obtained from

Amazon UK here

Amazon COM here

In the top 100 - #30 - many thanks!

It popped out of the Amazon co uk top 100 and now is back in again - so thanks again to all readers/writers who have purchased Write a western in 30 Days, which should prove helpful regardless of the genre you're drawn to write.

#30 in Kindle Store > Boo...ks > Education & Reference > Publishing & Books
#62 in Books > Reference > Publishing & Books > Authorship

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Write-Western-Days-Nik-Morton-ebook/dp/B00D6E3T6O/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1399123249&sr=1-1&keywords=nik+Morton

 

 

Blog Guest - Keith Chapman - part 2

As promised yesterday, this is part 2 of my interview with guest Keith Chapman. To recap, he was an editor and contributor to various fiction publications in London in the 1960s before shifting to New Zealand and spending nearly 35 years in newspaper and magazine journalism. He returned to fiction writing in earnest in 1992, using the pen-name Chap O'Keefe, writing westerns, and also edited the Black Horse Extra online magazine. For the last four years he has concentrated on bringing out his quite considerable back-list in e-book format, rather than producing new fiction.

Chap O'Keefe, his wife, three adult children and five grandchildren live in Auckland, New Zealand. The family home is high on a North Shore hillside overlooking Hellyer's Creek and the sparkling Waitemata Harbour.

PART TWO

Q&A continued…

Where do you find inspiration? (I know, for example, that one of your storylines was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle…)

Ah, the stock question which, like many, I find it hard to answer. What can be said? Writers must be readers and it's almost inevitable that they should try to emulate the writers they most admire.

"Mr O’Keefe has reworked the plot of a Sherlock Holmes story as an exploit of his ex-Pinkerton protagonist Joshua Dillard. The result is clever, atmospheric and exciting." – The District Messenger

 

These days, largely in retirement, I'm a great one for re-reading the books I enjoyed in my youth. I do a lot of what the ever-busy writer James Reasoner dubbed at his blog the other day “binge” reading. In recent times I've re-read consecutively all the Charteris-written Saint books, all 18 of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels (plus some of the short stories), and a slew of P. G. Wodehouse books. The last six novels I've read this month have been by Edgar Wallace. I'm currently reading a seventh with no sign I'm ready to tire of them yet.

Outside of other people's fiction, inspiration can come from research in books of history and biography, especially for westerns. Nothing surprising in that, I guess.

What are you working on now?

Not much. I'll be taking a week's holiday break shortly, so I have other chores to attend to outside of being Chap O'Keefe. The e-book conversions continue – more on that later – and I'm conscious of a need to explore distribution via routes additional to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.

What is your biggest distraction when it comes to writing?

What others call normal living. And as the only writer in the family, I find it very difficult to explain my distraction from this normality when I'm immersed in writing work. A novel of BHW length takes me around a month to write. At the end of this time, I become a very trying person for those living in the same house. How can they understand what is going on in my surely absent mind? Why is it so important to me? Why if it's important to anyone else, does that not show in the form of proper reward? In many ways it's far easier being a salaried journalist or editor, although these situations also have their frustrations.

 
What’s your favourite movie?

A difficult question. I know it's not playing the game, but may I say I don't have one? Although I own many DVDs and old VHS tapes, and once used to rent as many as five a week, I watch very few movies now. I last watched a DVD a few weeks ago. It was the 1938 screen version of Edgar Wallace's The Terror starring Alastair Sim, Bernard Lee, Arthur Wontner, Wilfred Lawson, Linden Travers, Henry Oscar and Richard Murdoch. Nothing hugely special, but great, melodramatic fun!

What’s your favourite quotation?

Over the years many quotations have appealed as being pithy or singularly apt in certain circumstances. I wouldn't say any one has remained the outright favourite. The followers of Writealot might find this one worthy of their attention: “Successful writing is two percent inspiration, forty-nine percent perspiration and forty-nine percent luck.” Terry Harknett (aka George G. Gilman) said it, or perhaps repeated it, in The Writer magazine in August 1979.

If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be and why?

I haven't travelled widely enough to know, and have actually lived in only two countries, Britain and New Zealand. The Britain that appealed to me had disappeared before I left it, and it won't be coming back. You'd need a time machine to get there.

For a variety of reasons New Zealand was a better place to buy a home and raise a family in 1967 than it is in 2014. But it never had a publishing industry that put out much of the material I would want to read and write. A primary consideration, tending to make me reply “New Zealand”, would be that all my children and grandchildren have been born and live here.

And last but not least – what’s your favourite food and why?

Is a favourite food really important? If pressed, I'd say I prefer traditional fare like porridge, fish and chips, roast pork accompanied by sharp apple sauce... And for a quick, easy lunch I like a tuna sandwich with lemon juice, tomato sauce and a thin slice of cheddar cheese. In colder weather, it's also excellent served hot and crisp straight out of a sandwich toaster.

I know you’ve embarked on publishing your back list in e-book format. Has this been an easy task?

No! Not at all. Reformatting old Word Perfect files for the Kindle via Open Office Writer software, then uploading a Microsoft Word file is a laborious business. You have to find and put together new covers, for which I use Paint.NET free software. I can't claim to be completely au fait with “pdn”, although I do know how to design covers that suit me.

Of course, you can pay other people to do all the work for you, but in my experience westerns aren't downloaded in sufficient number to make that short cut a justifiable expense. Also you'd lose some control over the look of the product, which is part of whatever appeal self-publishing does have.

When you have an e-book completed, you must remember, too, that Amazon acts solely as a distribution channel for the self-publisher. You really need to promote, to “sell” your e-book yourself. Most of the bestselling self-publishers spend hours working through social media like Facebook and Twitter. A website is a must, and you might benefit from a blog, as long as you have enough to say that will interest a wider circle than friends and family.

For e-books, Amazon are still dominant in the US market, so you can't afford to do without them. But outside the US, Amazon appears to have introduced a scheme of regional pricing that amounts to a surcharge making your e-books more expensive for non-American buyers. The details are in the comments here:http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/11/12/amazon-launches-local-kindle-store-australia/

This is annoying. The traditional book publishers had some excuse for charging extra for their books in far-flung parts of the world. But we were told the web is worldwide and e-books, having no physical dimensions or weight, would remove the additional cost of international shipping and handling.

 
Amazon admits it costs them no more to send an e-book to a customer in a country other than the US, and it does not collect sales tax for governments such as New Zealand's. With the new Kindle pricing for regional sub-domains – I have amazon.com.au in mind here – Amazon has taken a backward step. The price is supposed to be based automatically on a self-publisher's US price. For example, my $2.99 e-books cost Australian region customers $AU3.99, but this is 67 US cents more than the currency exchange conversion for $2.99. Change the Australian price yourself to a more accurate $AU3.28 – which you can do – and Amazon will chop your Kindle royalties by half.

I'm considering whether to try getting around this by reformatting yet again to make my e-books available through Smashwords on other platforms. But this will also involve producing another set of covers, because some of the retailers Smashwords supplies require higher-resolution images than the ones I've done for Amazon. To avoid double taxation, I will also have to fill in more IRS forms to show Smashwords' accounts people that I pay my income tax in New Zealand... Will any of this be worth the extra tedium?

 
Do you envisage writing new books direct for e-book release or would you still go through the traditional publishing route?

At present I have no new books planned. If I heard of a fiction market that appealed, I would send a query letter, a synopsis, and possibly sample chapters, to the applicable publisher or agent. I'd proceed from there if this elicited a promising response. You see, I'm a writer who is just as happy with a quiet life reading!

 
Now please tell us about your latest book release ...

This would be Ride the Wild Country, a Joshua Dillard western thriller originally published by Hale in 2005 and Magna (Dales Large Print) in 2008. The e-book is currently available only at Amazon, and you can read the blurb and the opening pages free on your e-reader or computer.

Thank you, Keith! Below is a breakdown about Keith's books, all worth reading.

NOTE (22 Feb 2014): Keith's website has just been updated - here

***

As well as standalone titles, the O'Keefe westerns include the adventures of the ex-Pinkerton detective, Joshua Dillard, and the exploits of the engaging Miss Lilian Goodnight, a scallywag heroine already mentioned, better known as Misfit Lil.

Chap O'Keefe's books are published in the series Black Horse Westerns, the Linford Western Library, and Dales Westerns. His fast-moving, action-packed stories are in the Gold Medal, Ace Books pocket-book tradition, but incorporate themes designed to appeal to the contemporary reader. Similarly, to accommodate readers' changing methods of accessing quality genre fiction at best prices, the number of O'Keefe westerns available in Kindle editions continues to grow. The first title was MISFIT LIL CHEATS THE HANGROPE. Check out the listing on Amazon.co.uk. Chapter one can also be sampled at http://chapokeefe.webs.com/bhemch/.

Fellow western author Ben Bridges says, "I'm so glad to see that this book is starting to get the recognition it truly deserves. Take it from someone who's collected and read westerns for more than forty years, MISFIT LIL CHEATS THE HANGROPE stands head and shoulders above the current crop of competitors! It has a fabulous story with - to this reader, at least - a completely unforeseen denouement, vivid, lively characters and regular bursts of action which - and here's the important bit – stem naturally from the plot and aren't just shoe-horned in to beef things up a bit. I have, of course, read Chap O'Keefe for a long while now, but genuinely feel that this is his best to date! Please keep 'em coming, Chap!"

Reader (and author) Richard Webster says, "I'm excited to hear of a new Misfit Lil book. It's a wonderful series with a delightful protagonist. Chap O'Keefe is doing an excellent job at nudging the genre forwards, something that's desperately needed if westerns are to continue to grow and flourish."

Legendary blogger Grumpy Old Bookman once said, "Misfit Lil . . . . What a terrific name for a character, eh? This book belongs to an endangered species: the western. As for the story: totally professional, as you would expect, and a lot of fun. By my count, MISFIT LIL FIGHTS BACK is the author's sixteenth book, so he knows how to do the job. Ms Lil has appeared before, and doubtless will again."

Several Kindle e-books have also been published featuring O'Keefe's other series hero, the ex-Pinkerton adventurer Joshua Dillard. They include LIBERTY AND A LAW BADGE, THE SANDHILLS SHOOTINGS, and SHOOTOUT AT HELLYER'S CREEK.

COMPLETE CHAP O'KEEFE WESTERNS LIST:

Gunsmoke Night (1993)
The Sheriff and the Widow (1994)
Shootout At Hellyer's Creek (1994)
The Outlaw and the Lady (1994)
The Gunman and the Actress (1995)
The Sandhills Shootings (1995)
Doomsday Mesa (1995)
Frontier Brides (2004)
The Rebel and the Heiress (2005)
Ride the Wild Country (2005)
The Lawman and the Songbird (2005)
Ghost Town Belles (2006)
Misfit Lil Rides in (2006)
Misfit Lil Gets Even (2006)
Sons and Gunslicks (2007)
Misfit Lil Fights Back (2007)
Peace at Any Price (2007)
Misfit Lil Hides Out (2008)
A Gunfight Too Many (2008)
Misfit Lil Cleans Up (2008)
Blast to Oblivion (2009)
Misfit Lil Robs the Bank (2009)
Misfit Lil Cheats the Hangrope (2009)
Faith and a Fast Gun (2010)
Liberty and a Law Badge (2010)

My e-book initiation

Compared to many, I joined the e-book revolution rather late. I have a private library of over 4,000 printed books – many thousands more were consigned to charity shops when we moved to Spain. I like to see them on the shelves. And, let’s be honest, the majority of titles aren’t on the bookshop shelves more than a couple of months, so you need to buy when you find them. I know that this attitude has been negated somewhat by the remarkable availability of books on the Internet. Yet I still like browsing bookshops of all kinds, hoping to find that nugget I’ve been seeking for years, or coming across a useful reference tome.

About a quarter of my home library

I started with a Kindle for PC on my desktop and soon realised I needed the real thing for its portability. Serendipity knocked and as I stepped down as Chairman of the Writers’ Circle, the members kindly clubbed together to buy me a Kindle.

As the Editor in Chief of Solstice (2011-2013), I found this Kindle invaluable. I converted submitted MSS to PDF and loaded them on my Kindle and read the submissions away from the computer and email interruptions.

Of course there’s nothing like holding your own printed book in your hands. That’s a special feeling. Any of my e-books that haven’t been printed yet, I create and print a DVD cover and insert it into an empty DVD case; this is then stowed on my bookshelf, physical evidence of my book’s existence. When the book is printed, I remove the DVD case from the shelf.

The first time I ordered an e-book through my Kindle, I was impressed. What I like is that any e-book I order from Amazon.com (all non-UK orders have to go through .com and not .co.uk), once I’ve read it I can remove it from my device and it resides in the Archive at Amazon. I can call it back to my Kindle at any time.

I’m not impressed with the fact that 99c books bought through Amazon end up costing a lot more – about $3.40 due to taxes; though the read is usually still a bargain.

And, unlike most print publishers, e-book publishers will accept novellas and even single short stories. In the old days, action and adventure stories had a market in men’s and weekly magazines, but that’s long since been closed. Indeed, several popular male writers of the sixties and seventies started with magazine stories. Now, e-publishers may provide an outlet for that material. As long as the standards don’t slip.

And that’s the downside of e-books - the proliferation of self-published books. There’s nothing wrong with getting a book self-published, so long as it has been properly edited. Sadly, many e-publishers pay scant attention to editing. I know, even mainstream publishers are guilty of howlers these days. A Clive Cussler co-authored book mentions the Royal Army, presumably assuming that since there’s a Royal Navy and a Royal Air Force, it must be right! And that was in hardback, not e-book. Danielle Steel’s The Ring has at least 35 typos, after which I stopped counting. So sloppy editing isn’t just the province of e-book publishers. Granted, some things always tend to slip through, no matter how many edit passes you make. I’ve invented the editor’s curse: readers spot the things you missed, but don’t notice all that you do because it’s invisible.

 
As the saying goes, everybody has a book in them – but for the majority that’s where it should stay. The e-book revolution has made it too easy for dross to get published. It was bad enough with the countless vanity publishers whose editing was generally abysmal, but now it’s worse. I’ve reviewed a few vanity/assisted published books in my time and to be fair I believe that both Matador and, in particular, Pen do serve their clients well.
 
Because an e-book can be produced relatively fast – as compared to the mainstream lead-time of eighteen months – there’s a tendency to rush the work out. This undue haste should be mitigated with quality control constraints.

Not surprisingly, one type of e-book has undergone a remarkable surge in popularity – the erotic novel. Where somebody might have baulked at reading an erotic paperback in public, they have no inhibition about reading one on an electronic device. Brown wrapping paper has probably seen a drop in sales.

 
And in this information age it’s quite likely that people who wouldn’t dream of reading a print book – I read a book once, why read another one? – might be drawn to e-books because they’re onscreen and digital. In the old days, you had your purchasers of hardbacks and of paperbacks, often separate individuals; now you can add to the mix purchasers of e-books.
 
Of course, e-books don’t suffer from broken spines, spilt liquid stains, page discolouration and mould. They remain pristine. There’s another plus: no shelves to dust.

E-books are not demons or replacements for books. They’re another outlet for creative writing. As before, the reader needs to beware that not all books will live up to their promise on the blurb.

 
Where once I didn’t see the relevance of e-books, now I can accept them as yet another method of reaching readers.

***

My e-books are:

Blood of the Dragon Trees (Crooked Cat Publishing)

Spanish Eye (Crooked Cat Publishing)

Write a western in 30 Days (John Hunt Publishing)

Bullets for a Ballot (BTAP Publishing)

Death is Another Life (Solstice Publishing)

When the Flowers are in Bloom (Solstice Publishing)

 

 

Lust to read will never dwindle with a Kindle

Some said it was the end of an era. After five years as Chairman of the Torrevieja Writers' Circle (TWC), I was stepping down. My last day wielding the gavel was Wednesday, 23 February. There were about 28 members in attendance and several apologies. The first half was a normal session of reading and critique, then cakes, buns (thanks to the bakers)and drinks for the halftime period. There followed a presentation of a Kindle, contributed by the members. I was very touched by this thoughtful present. (Some whispered I've been a bit touched for ages, hence the puns...) Mary K (Hasta Luego)and Chris (Woe...)read out poems, which were both appreciated and struck several chords. Several - about 22 stayed behind to eat a menu del dia. A really good day, thank you all!


I finished off with a small 'thank you':

After five years as Chairman, I ask myself, why do we come to the TWC meetings? Presumably, we all like to read – whether books or magazines. Most of us were brought up with a love of books – either imparted by our parents or our teachers. Even in this age of the e-book, books play an important part in our lives. As Cicero said, ‘A room without books is like a body without soul.’

The Canadian-Japanese Professor of English, Samuel Hayakawa said, ‘In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read… It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.’

They’re talking about books. But we aren’t a reading circle. We strive to write. As E L Doctorow said, ‘Planning to write is not writing. Outlining a book is not writing. Researching is not writing. Talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.’

So it’s the placing of your bum on a chair and writing. No pressure, there then.
Still, as we know – no pressure, no diamonds.

Many of you have written for years and received little or no pecuniary reward, but that doesn’t stop you, nor should it. Richard Bach, who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull, says, quite rightly, ‘A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.’

So, if it isn’t for the financial reward, why do we write? Is it because we must? Katherine Mansfield said, ‘Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far to write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.’ Maybe we want to make sense of the world, or understand ourselves, our past. Indeed, the life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

I think I’ve used this quotation from O Henry before, but make no apology for using it again: "A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it."

Maybe that’s it: we just like telling stories! To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything. Of course, you don’t have to rely on imagination; you can reminisce about your past. You don’t have to write fiction. You can write memoirs and poems, rants and articles. It doesn’t matter, really, so long as you write. You write to be read, however. You write for an audience, even if that’s an audience of one or the circle members only. You don’t write for praise, though it’s always welcome. You write to affect others, to raise a laugh, stir an emotion, elicit a tear. You don’t write to slavishly copy your favourite authors. Each one of us is unique, and we see the world and humanity in different ways. The secret is that in our writing we invite the reader to see the world – our imagined world – as we see it.

In my five years of Chairmanship, I’ve been privileged to listen to a vast array of writing from the TWC members – poems that made me think or cry, stories that made me laugh and empathise, articles that made me see some aspect of life with a fresh eye. Many of you have already done it, but I would recommend that in your writing, make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Thank you for putting up with my terrible puns over the years. I’ll miss banging my gavel, and inevitably I’ll miss several gems that will be read out in future meetings, since I will no longer be a regular attendee. However, to use a final quotation, in the immortal words of the Terminator, ‘I’ll be back.’