2012 Financial Report.

Minutes Of The Meeting

In Attendance

ML Stewart - President.

ML Stewart - Secretary.

ML Stewart - Author.

ML Stewart - Twat.

Apologies For Absence.

Billy No Mates.

When I started this blog, back in 1921, my tongue-in-cheek goal was to see how many books I could distribute to the literate global public in a year. Back then I promised to keep you all informed on progress, tactics and, more importantly, sales figures and revenue. Now, I'll be the first to hold up my hands and say I became a little lost on my path of divulging said knowledge, but I'm here to make up for it. So here's the title of today's blog...

Is It Really Worth Self-publishing My Book? (Or should I just shoot myself now?)

Now I know many people read this blog who are researching the marketing of their latest or debut book. The stats from blogger.com tell me so. If you Google a phrase such as "can I sell a thousand books online" and you end up on this pathetic blog, the Internet Gestapo tell me exactly where you are and how you got here. So here goes.

Part 1.

Q) Is your book any good?

A) And I mean that sincerely. Okay there may be 100,000 words in there, but do they actually make any sense. Are they all spelt correctly and do they actually work together to make a story? Oh, they do? In that case: Is the story of interest to readers, or have you pinched bits from the last fifty books you read and spliced them into a novel you now call your own? If your answer to this question is 'yes' then please fuck off and stop clogging up the internet with your "why is no one buying my book?" crap.

Part 2.

So you've passed part 1. Your book is as good as you can make it. Great Aunt Fanny (a retired English teacher) read it on her death bed and pointed out any errors or spelling mistakes to you (I hate the term 'typos'. It's so Obama). So now you reckon you've got a best-seller on your hands, the money's going to come flooding in; foreign translation rights, and Hollywood directors are going to offer you their wives to sleep with just for the chance to make a few billion out of your idea.

Now you're sitting there thinking "Yes, Aunt Fanny said the book was perfect and the best thing she's ever read. She even sighed at the ending. Just before she flat-lined." Well that's great, you're well on your way to changing the literary world for the better.

Part 3: Marketing.

Okay, so you've published your book on Amazon. You've checked the formatting to make sure it actually looks like a book. By this I mean that each paragraph is kind of pushed in a bit, andthere'sagapbetweeneachofthewordssothereadercanmakesenseofwhatthey'rereading. Yes? Excellent! You're on the road to fame and fortune.But what about the cover? Does it look like the real thing, or is it a square picture downloaded from Google Images with your name slapped across it in some strange (but unique) font? No? It's all perfect? Then we'll continue.

Most self-published authors work for a living, unless they have twelve kids or more, so they upload their books at the weekend. Let's say you were working an extra shift on Saturday, so published your book Sunday morning. What happens now is you and the wife go out for a celebration Sunday roast at the local pub and sink a few beers. The cost = £55. The time to recoup this extravagance when your book begins to sell = 6 months to a year. 

Monday Morning.

You're up at 6:00am to see how many books you've sold. You log into KDP and check your US sales. There's a big beige rectangle. No sales. "Fuckin' Yanks!" you cry. Then you click on UK sales. The same. Nothing, zero, nula, squat, fuck all. Europe has a similar story to tell. So does Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. By Friday, you're logging on every hour, hoping the boss doesn't notice, and still, not one single person, out of the billions on the planet, has the slightest interest in buying your book (even though Aunt Fanny loved it.) So what now?

Reviews.

So there you are, depressed and frustrated. So you think... If I have some great reviews, readers will want to buy the book and I can jack in my job and concentrate on writing? Yes? Perhaps, yet doubtful. 

DO NOT, EVER, write your own reviews. I would go as far as to say, do not even ask friends and family to write a review for you. They are so obvious and detrimental to your cause. "This book was excellent and I can't wait to read his next one."..."This is the best book I have ever read and I hope it's made into a movie soon." 

Forums. Twitter. Facebollox.

OK, so it's taken you, let's say for argument's sake, six months to write and edit your masterpiece. You consequently spend a month reading 3 million gigabytes of bullshit regarding social media and self-promotion. You then waste the next five months spamming each and every e-book forum on the planet, in which time you could have actually written another book, refined your style and actually have something to Tweet about (i.e. your latest book.) But no, you choose to languish in the self-imposed failed writers' ghettoes on Amazon and Goodreads, wallowing in self pity and trying to collectively work out why you haven't become a best-selling author yet. You waste another six months plugging and spamming your book to death. In which time you could have three books to your credit. READERS DO NOT READ FORUMS. THEY READ BOOKS! 

ML Stewart (Secretary) demands order, insisting that many authors who languish in the forums receive favourable reviews from other forum members (virtual friends). ML Stewart (Author) tells ML Stewart (Secretary) to shut the fuck up and says, 'let the record show that I will prove this has nothing to do with sales.' An author cannot live on reviews alone. Five-star reviews will not feed your children. Reviews will not pay your council tax and weekly alcohol bill.

Anyway, to cut a long blog short. I can't help you write or edit your book. I can't give you ideas or advice. In fact, I can't do anything for you. All I can do is share my experience from the past 18 months, since I first self-published.

A: Don't be a wanker. I regularly read Twitter accounts, forum posts etc. from a number of writers, both published and not. If you decide to buy 2,000 Twitter followers for $5 and make a twat of yourself when you launch a competition and only receive two replies, that's because you are a fake. I have 69 Twitter followers, three of which I think are dead. Don't fool yourself into thinking they are logging on every morning to see what you have to say. They're not. They don't give a fuck about you. All they want to know is when your next book is available (and if it's too expensive they won't buy it anyway). They are only following you because they have read your work and like it, so don't spam the poor buggers twenty times a day with plugs for books they've already read, and for God's sake, don't for one minute think they wish to know if you're in Asda looking for asparagus, or that your kid has chickenpox. BE PROFESSIONAL! (OK, I may not be one to talk, but the difference between you and I is that I don't give a shit. You are trying to make something of yourself, to perfect 'the craft', to be liked, loved, admired and wealthy. Don't brag about how good you are, and the latest review you received saying what a steaming pile of excellence your book was. Your followers and fans like your work already, that's why they follow you. Just keep your head down and get on with writing. Point taken?

B: To touch on a point I've already made. Do not use sock puppets. Don't start multiple accounts on the forums and praise your own books, nobody will believe you, except Aunt Fanny's widower. What really pisses me off, and I've seen a lot of it lately, are tweets asking for honest reviews of books. The Twitter account holder then sends out a copy of his / her book and the lap dogs give 5-star reviews on Amazon / Goodreads / BolloxBooks, but the critics don't. They may mention the fact that they didn't like the book on their blog, but they don't jump in with a 2 or 3-star review in the public forum. This, to me, is a form of manipulation. If someone asks their Twitter or Facebook followers for a review, then said review should be made public on the books retail sites. Am I ranting?

Order! Order!

OK. Enough syntax saliva. Let's cut to the chase. In an attempt to compare, I trawled the internet to find another self-published author who was willing to publish their online earnings, and I have found none. The closest I came was an author who published his monthly book sales from January to December 2012. But that's where it became interesting. The author in question shall remain nameless, but I'm glad he made his sales public, as when I first heard of him he was the buzz of the e-book forums. Let me elaborate on that, I was actually a little jealous of him. Let us refer to said author as 'MR. X'. And to some degree he still is the darling of many forums. I haven't read his books, simply because I do not read work by other authors, but his literary skills appear to have been missed by the major publishing houses. Something which may be corrected in the near future, according to many of his readers. 

So, we're looking at the period Jan - Dec 2012. Mr. X's book (BOOK X) has garnered 143 global five-star reviews. During the same period, my books received maybe 30.

My point?  The value of writing versus online self-promotion. Here are the sales figures. Mr X's sales are in the yellow column. My books are in the following columns. FBK = The Facebook Killer (Parts 1 -3 and the completed trilogy), UKI = The United Kingdom of Island, and SC = The Sunday Club.

So you can be everyone's friend and have a ton of glowing reviews, or you can knuckle down, tell your ego to piss off, and keep writing.

Forum friends and cronyistic reviews, or sales? The choice is yours.

So, during 2012 I sold a total of 24,547 books (The free giveaways of FBK1 stopped in early Jan, so the figures are basically purely revenue sales), and Mr. X sold 1513. I received 30 5-star reviews, Mr. X received 100+.

So things are looking pretty good.
MR X: 1513 sales.
ML Stewart: 24,547.

But it doesn't stop there. The above sales figures are only for Amazon. I also sell via Smashwords to Apple readers (amongst others)

And here is the screenshot for 2012 sales via Smashwords.

2012 Sales

Mr X = 1,513 

ML Stewart = 36,645 

So, would-be authors, you can see it's well worth the hassle of formatting your books to publish with Smashwords.com. Amazon is by no means the 'be all and end all' of self-publishing.

Can you make money with e-books? I think so. Okay, fair enough, I still haven't reached my target of 500,000, but I'm 1/5th of the way there...almost.

Regards,
MLS


Disclaimer: This blog was written in a hurry and has not been edited.

Twitter: @AuthorMLStewart
Hate-mail: ml.stewart@yahoo.co.uk
On Facebook somewhere, too.

A Collection Of 5 Short Stories Available Next Week.

More details to follow. 

Oooh! Look! ML Stewart Got Off His Lazy Arse and Updated His Blog.

Ten months. TEN BLOODY MONTHS! Forty weeks of my life I've been pregnant with this frigging book. And yesterday, the 28th November, 2012 at precisely 5:03 am GMT, the bastard was born.

It was delivered by email cesarean to its rightful mother in London. The woman who planted the seed. The lady who made me gain a stone by sitting in a chair for ten months while this 600-page monster grew inside me. The editor who, on the 2nd February, got me up the duff by asking whether I'd thought about writing a book for a commercial publisher.

But now it's over. The torment of surrogacy is at an end. Little Hunter has been shipped off to the HarperCollins family, and now I'm just waiting to see if he'll settle in. Will they love him, or decide he's not worth the paper? Will they send him back to me saying he's shit all over the place and can't even punctuate properly? Or will they decide he's deserving of a good home, and ask me to make more babies for them? Let's wait and see. Worst case scenario, I'll give him to my tax-avoiding Uncle Amazon and Aunt Apple to look after.

Well, it's almost Christmas again, and I haven't tallied my book sales for months. But I promise I'll get round to it before the 25th. The monthly cheques are still coming in, so I know somebody's buying them.

So what now? I hear you cry, with genuine interest. Well that all depends whether or not HarperCollins want to sign me up. If they do, then it's back to Europe, a million emails, more editing and start work on the next book. If they don't, then I'll self-publish Hunter and crack on regardless.

There's a certain freedom that comes with self-publishing. It's a little like owning your own pub (I don't think I need to elaborate on that one). Having said that, for your average Joe Bloggs to spend ten months writing when he could be working and earning decent money. It makes one wonder how they manage to do it. I know many self-published authors write in their free time and have day jobs, but Christ! Could you be arsed coming home after eight hours down the factory to decide whether to use a chainsaw or an axe on Mr Biggleton's head in chapter 7?

As for my next book. It's already drafted out (the synopsis that is). DS Liz Porteous - of Facebook Killer 3 fame - leads the way in Hunter and so she shall in the next novel, too. She's a little like me after gender reassignment surgery. Just that she doesn't smoke. Not yet anyway.

I've talked about it for a long time, but I'm definitely going to work on a collection of short, sharp, shocking stories, too. After I get back from the factory, that is. Stinking of fish. They're going to be totally self-indulgent. Stories and anecdotes from my past, carefully crafted into unreadable crap for the masses. Shit! I think E.L. James already beat me to that one.

Anyway loyal readers. I shall have to love you and leave you, as I think I need stitches.

Until I can be bothered to write another blog post, take care of yourselves and remember: Never trust a man with bleached hair and a big cigar.


Regards,
MLS

The Complete Facebook Killer Now Available For Apple Readers...

It does exactly what it says in the title.

Buy it now from ITunes, or your life won't be worth living.

Ponderings of the Mind.

Imagine you've been sentenced to a year in prison for a crime you didn't commit. Not just prison, but solitary confinement. A box, with a window through which you never look. A window, on the other side of which life goes on as normal. Flowers bloom, wilt, then die. Your friends enjoy life and grow older. But you miss it all stuck in your little box.

Then imagine those twelve months served in total silence. Part of your punishment is to be strapped into a chair, staring at a headache-inducing light for ten hours of your waking being. When your daily chastisement is over, all you want to do is sleep, but you can still see that light. It plagues your dreams and its the first thing you see when you awake, unprepared, but resigned to the fact that you will be strapped into that chair again, and again and again.

There is no early release for good behaviour. You've started your sentence and you have to finish it. Every last day, hour and second.

Sounds pretty shit, doesn't it?

Well, for those of you that have never done it. That's what it's like to write a book. A solitary, silent vacuum in which your brain bleeds as it tries to create, conjure and perfect, attempting to juggle 26 little letters into an original and entertaining order. You spend ten hours writing something that can be read in ten minutes. Like a bridge which took twenty years to build, where ten men lost their lives, and you can drive over it in a minute, not even thinking about the million nuts and bolts which went into its construction, nor the blood, sweat and funerals.

I shy away from this ongoing debate regarding e-readers versus paper books. I find it a little like berating your grandfather for still listening to his gramophone when you bought the old bugger an I-pod for Christmas.

Does it really matter how the media is delivered? After all, it's still made up of the same million nuts and bolts.

And as for price. If an author has slogged his guts out, built his bridge, and wants to let people use it for free, then so be it, that's his choice. Or if that same author wants to install a toll for passage from A to B, start to end, then that, again, is his choice and his alone.

Okay, perhaps it does devalue the bridge, and maybe it does make other bridges look expensive, or their builders greedy. But at the end of the day, the free bridge will attract far more traffic.

The Amazon™ is a mighty, raging river, washing a lot of debris out to the Sea of Obscurity as it goes. And to those who are able to reach the other side safely. Well, I wish you all the luck in the world.

Best regards,

MLS

Twitter Rubbish - @AuthorMLStewart

E-Hate Mail - ml.stewart@yahoo.co.uk

Please HATE me on Facebook

Fifty Shades of Marketing.

Now, call me what you will, and say what you like about the 50 Shades series, but one thing emphatically can not be denied, and that is the marketing machine behind the books.

I'm currently, for my sins, still in Australia, and even here the bookshops are full of the stuff. Admittedly they are selling them off cheap now. In fact the refugees have abandoned the idea of coming from Indonesia on boats now. They're building rafts from 50 Shades books and rowing across. It's saving them a fortune...allegedly.

Anyway. This hyped-up media machine has got one thing wrong. Now, I know I'll be hounded down for this, and I probably shouldn't say it, BUT, I will anyway. The big mistake they made is pictured below...

 

 

 That's right. Her face, in my opinion, doesn't quite fit with the subject matter. I mean, she's a lovely looking woman and I'm sure she has a personality to match, but to be reading all this kinky sex action and have the image of the author at the back of your mind is a little ... well, a little off-putting, perhaps. Like opening a copy of Playboy and finding your mother spread across the centre pages.

 

Now, I am not being rude here, so calm down and put away your poison pen letters. I have oodles of respect for the dominatrix pictured above and I'm pleased for her newfound wealth. I just can't help thinking she should have gone the same route as myself, to remain a little more anonymous, maybe. Or, better still, to lie and use a double.

 



 

 



Now, the reason I can get away with saying this is because of my bio picture. When I published my first e-book I was warned not to scare the readers, having once been described as 'thugly', so I took heed and used a digitally altered photograph.

 

I see, amongst the slew of erotica now bombarding the world, there is an author called Anonymous. I like this approach. She's probably an eighteen-stone American gentleman with chronic skin disease, but we'll never know. He/she is an enigma. A Banksy. The person that stole my car in 2004 and never got caught....You get my drift? No?

 

Well, having just successfully slagged off the most successful author of all time, I'll move on to my little endeavours.

 

I've just been contacted by Israel's largest publishers, Kinneret, with an enquiry about purchasing the Hebrew tarnslation rights for the Facebook Killer series. Astonishing, I know. Strange? Perhaps a little. But I'll keep you updated. If anything happens I may even give away a few copies. Who knows? I'm sure I have followers who can read Hebrew. If not, it's quite an easy language to learn...if you plan to live until you're 310. I like the way they described my style as "Geurilla Publishing".

 

Apart from that, nothing! I'm just plodding away. 'Hunter' is up to 90,000 words, with around another 30,000 to go, and sales are okay, considering it's the slow season, at a steady 2,000+ per month. Nothing to bang on about really.

 

Well, that's it from me. I'm off to write an erotic novel now, involving a stallion and a Dutch woman in a wheelchair.

 

 

Regards, as ever,

 

MLS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 



Follow @AuthorMLStewart

Give a man a fish and he will feed himself for a day, give him a rod and he will sell it for beer money.

[coughs]

"A bit bloody dusty in here, innit?"

Shit. I just checked the date of my last blog entry. The first of June. So let me begin, even though I already have, by apologising for not motivating my lazy arse and letting my thousands of fans know what's going on in the f+cked up world of the ML Stewart monster.

As I mentioned on Twitter, I have been asked by HarperCollins UK to submit the full manuscript for my current book project "Hunter". This is on a strictly 'no promises' basis. In other words don't sue us for wasting your time if we think the book is shit.

One of HC's editors first contacted me earlier this year after reading The Facebook Killer (which she absolutely loved) and asked if I would consider writing a book for them. And so, after several emails, phone calls and storyline changes, I am now approaching 70,000 words of my latest novel, Hunter.

Set in London, it's the story of a serial killer whose horrific crimes were never rationalised, even though he was captured and is now imprisoned in the high security unit of Belmarsh Prison. When, twenty years later, another victim is found, mutilated in the exact same fashion, DS Liz Porteous is assigned the task of solving the riddle surrounding the original murders in a effort to stop the modern day body count rising.

If that sounded like a sales pitch, I'm sorry, it wasn't supposed to. I am writing Hunter in the same style as FBK. There are manic moments, dark (almost sadistic humour) and I defy anyone who eventually reads the book (whether it is published by HC or self-published) to work out the plot before I allow it.

One or two people have pointed out that FBK was a little two-dimensional, and my reply has always been - yes, it's supposed to be. You have one man and a laptop computer. That man's psyche becomes three, but they always belong to Dermott, and his apples, his victims, are just that. Victims. The reader doesn't need to know any more about them than what they give away on their Facebook page.

Hunter on the other hand delves much deeper. We learn a lot more about Liz Porteous, the serial killer's mind is opened up to us and, Edward King, a freelance journalist, makes a clumsy entrance to add to the storyline. But be warned, I do still indulge in moments of literary insanity.

As for book sales? Well [gets out the calculator] In a nutshell, I have sold (and given a few away) 81,384 books. Across the board I am currently selling a little over 1,000 books a month through Amazon, and around 1,700 per month via Smashwords, 99% of which go to Apple readers.
 

FBK 1 & 2 have been numbers 1 and 2 in the UK Apple Horror charts for over a year now, and are still fighting off the likes of Stephen King. FBK3 managed #17 in the Overall Apple Top 100, but that lesser known Fifty Ways To Beat Your Bitch opened the floodgates for an Erotifest and Apple buyers lost their minds, their principles and quite a lot of skin from their arse cheeks, too.

To be honest I rarely check my book sales nowadays, let alone the reviews. I just hammer away, day in day out on my next piece of work. I have a strict regime. Get up, read the paper online, drink horrendous amounts of tea until my kidneys scream, begin writing, smoke cigarettes until my lungs scream, move on to red wine until my liver screams, and keep writing until my characters scream.

I would just like to add that I have done no self-promotion whatsoever for almost five months now, and book sales have remained constant. It may be snobbery, but I now tend to look at the self-promo-prostitutes with an air of disdain...which, reminds me, I have a date with DS Porteous. It would be rude to keep her waiting.

Best regards,

MLS

Twitter Rubbish - @AuthorMLStewart

E-Hate Mail - ml.stewart@yahoo.co.uk

The Independent ML Stewart Facebook Appreciation Society