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What Catherine Did (in London, Last Week)

28 Sep

During my hectic three-day jaunt to London last week I met the lovely Joanna Penn, she of the fantastically useful The Creative Penn and bestselling self-published author of the Arkane series of novels, and she interviewed me about all things self-publishing.

(While both of us sat in the lovely forecourt of the British Museum and glared at anyone who came walking too close to us while chatting loudly on their phone. And also entertained a lot of pigeons, which I didn’t realize until I watched the video…)

You can read her post about and watch the full video here, or click the image below.

SERIOUS FACE.

Also, Self-Printed is now out there in the wide world. You can buy the paperback from Amazon stores (including Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk; just make sure it’s the second edition you get although thanks to Market Place Sellers the first edition is about the cost of an iMac at the moment…) and the Kindle edition from all Kindle stores, including Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. You can still buy the e-books directly from me, although they’ve gone up to their normal price of $4.99 (but still include a 30% discount off the book on CreateSpace).

In other news—big, good news—Bring Your Book To Market, the 3-day course on self-publishing your book and using social media to help your profile as an author that Ben Johncock and I did at Faber Academy last February is happening next February too. Hooray! You can find out all the details here. I know I’m hopelessly biased, but it really is a good course, especially if you’re serious about this whole self-publishing thing (even as a sideline and especially if it’s a backlist we’re talking about) and Faber Academy is a beautiful place to spend three days, overlooking Bloomsbury Square.

Also, if you know of any entertaining 50 Shades of Grey reviews—good or bad, hating the book or hailing it as their favorite ever—send me the links, would you please? Thanks muchly.

I’m getting something very special next week: time! What a wondrous thing that will be. I can barely remember what it feels like. So brace yourself for a post-a-day for a while.

Have a good weekend!

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Video Friday: B*tches in Bookshops

6 Apr

I don’t think they’ll be winning any Grammy awards for their rapping skills but this video is funny and—although I hate it when people say this—well observed. (It only annoys me because people say it so much. Well observed seems to the new unputdownable. Or the new If you liked Stieg Larsson… But I digress.)

In a related note, I will no longer say “I don’t read e-books.” It’s going to be all “I carry spines” for me from now on…

Discovered via Gemma Burgess’ blog. 

The Birth of a Book (VIDEO)

2 Apr

So… that was pretty crazy, right? Yikes.

If you haven’t been around these parts in the last few days, you’ve missed quite the drama. In a nutshell: last Monday I received a suspiciously flattering e-mail from someone called Mogoli Angelberg that contained a link to a book about selling e-books by someone called Jeff Rivera. When I googled “Mogoli Angelberg” the only thing I found was evidence that he and Rivera were quite close friends indeed. On Tuesday I posted about it, and practically every day since some new revelation about Mogoli and his friend Jeff has come to light. It’s really been an education in how not to sell your e-book, if not how not to conduct yourself online.

If you haven’t read This Is An Ethical Way to Sell Your E-book? I Disagree yet—or you only read it the day I posted it, before all the updates were added which turned out to be even longer than the post itself—I suggest you make a cereal bowl of coffee and go read it now.

But I can’t stay on The Curious Case of Mogoli Angelberg forever more and so today, I’m moving on. With this amazing video of a book—a real book—being born.

Yeah. Put that in your Kindle and smoke it.

Video Friday: Shakespeare & Company, Paris

16 Mar

I have a confession to make. Paris is my favorite place in the world but, in all the times I’ve been there, I’ve never been to Shakespeare & Company, one of the world’s most iconic bookstores. This is a travesty, I know—and one I will rectify at the earliest opportunity—but it’s just that every time I’ve been there, I seem to have been there with someone who hadn’t visited the city before and we had limited time. (Or I’ve been there with someone who hadn’t visited Paris before, I had limited time and I was there mainly to attend a Harlan Coben signing in La Defense.) Therefore I’ve seen the Eiffel Tower more times than anyone should, but I’ve never been to Shakespeare & Co. This wonderful video is the closest I’ll get to it for the moment:

Visit the Shakespeare & Co. website here (the homepage is currently a beautiful tribute to George Whitman, the owner, who died in December aged 98) or read about what it’s like to live in the bookshop in Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co., a memoir by Jeremy Mercer. And although I’d warn against it, if you want to fuel your writing-in-Paris daydreams, invest in a copy of Eric Maisel’s A Writer’s Paris. You’ll be saving for a Parisian studio apartment rental before you reach the last page, I promise/warn you.

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Video Friday: Sh*t Agents and Editors Say

17 Feb

After Sh*t Girls Say, Sh*t Bartenders Say, Sh*t Baristas Say and approximately 6,393 other Sh*t [Insert A Group of People] Say videos, Sh*t Agents and Editors Say was so inevitable that they put it in the title of the video.

From The Penguin Press, discovered through Caroline Smailes’ Facebook page.

If you’re looking for a procrastination activity—and you can’t, by law, call yourself a real writer if you’re not—and you have self-published a book, do take a few minutes to fill out The Taleist Self-Publishing Survey. The results are going to be soooo interesting, so let’s help them hit their target of 1,000 responders and make that happen.

Have a good weekend!

Video Friday: A Bitter Book Trailer

10 Feb

Simon Spurrier’s novel A Serpent Uncoiled now has a very bitter but very good book trailer. I usually say book trailers don’t sell books—at least, not by themselves—but in this case it’s at least done it once, because after watching this I will definitely be buying a paperback copy…

He also has a related post on his blog, On Success.

Video found via Futurebook.

Have a good weekend! 

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A Video That’s Not a Book Trailer for RESULTS NOT TYPICAL

4 Oct

If you don’t already know, my younger brother John is a thespian. A few weeks back him and his friend Alan, also an actor, made a short video in which John plays the part of a crazy infomercial presenter flogging some new fangled exercise device which looks suspiciously like a dumbbell bar with no dumbbells…

Obviously John knows about Results Not Typical but he hasn’t read it (yet), and so couldn’t have known that this video is just like something Slimmit, the evil weight loss company whose headquarters serve as the novel’s setting, would produce, and that they have a crazy infomercial “doctor” of their own (although he’s not called Dr. Valdimir Vodka Eureka…). So even though this video is not a book trailer for Results Not Typical, and it’s really more Results Not Typical meets Father Ted meets my brother’s crazy brain, I thought I’d share it with you.

The Results Not Typical blog tour continues. Today I’m answering probing questions posed by Laura over at Ladies Who Critique and if you missed it on Twitter yesterday, this glowing review from ChickLit Reviews made my week, if not my entire month! Find out more about the blog tour and your chance to win one of five paperback copies here, or click the blog tour post in the sidebar. 

In non-Results Not Typical news, Backpacked is now available in paperback for €11 plus some change and FREE worldwide delivery from The Book Depository Woo-hoo! 

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