Guest Blogger - Neil Ayres

This week, it came to my attention that the lovely Neil Ayres of the veggiebox blog has published The New Goodbye - a collection of short stories - as an e-book through Smashwords.

(That's Neil, in the photo.)

The Smashwords site describes The New Goodbye like this:

In this collection of realist short stories, Neil George Ayres details the often overlooked depth of modern relationships. From the self-contained love story of a modern marriage, through to the microcosm of the patrons of a working class public house, all life is here. If you love Raymond Carver or Jon McGregor, you're in safe hands.

I know Neil is proud of the stories in this collection so I invited him to Hawkins Bizarre to say a bit about e-publishing in general and the collection in particular. So, over to him.

Alis has been kind enough to invite me on here to pimp my new short story collection and talk a bit about ebooks, so here I go.

As someone well aware of how expensive it is to print and distribute a book (I’d worked in print and print production for over seven years before moving over to the web), and how little of the overall price goes to the publisher (even less filters through to the author), I fail to understand why mainstream publishers are being so hesitant in embracing the ebook. The majority in the UK—imprints like Harper Collins’ The Friday Project are exceptions—are insisting on listing their ebooks at similar prices to the paper equivalent. The intention may be an effort to stall a drop in print sales, but the effect is more that they’re leaving customers who could potentially save them a good deal of money out of pocket. If this behaviour continues, then long-term traditional publishers are in danger of losing these customers to new publishing models, such as Cursor, the one being developed by Richard Nash, or to Mark Coker’s Smashwords, which I’m using myself and which has struck distribution deals with both Sony and Barnes & Noble, with more in the pipeline.

The book publishers are letting booksellers - who already have a stranglehold over them on the high street - lead the way in the ebook market. Most publishers seem content to let Sony fight their corner for them, and offer little support, against the online retailers like Amazon and Waterstones.

What’s the alternative? The production costs for an ebook are an infinitesimal fraction of those for print, and can probably be soaked up by retraining production staff and ejecting some of the expensive processing software they use for their jobs. Rather than plowing the money saved into an even greater share for the distritbutors, publishers should now be taking the fight to them. A single house selling its own books is never going to be able to take on the might of a giant like Amazon, but a collaboration between the major houses, perhaps partnering with a technology provider like Sony, which has already shown its support for publishers over retailers, may be able to. What book publishing needs is an effective body promoting co-operation between houses and representing the interests of the entire book industry, including the readers.

To me, the model for the future of publishing is simple: retain the hardback for readers who still aren’t ready to surrender the feel and smell of a paper product between their fingers. If anything the publishers will make more money on hardback sales than they do now (as hardbacks are a bigger money-spinner per unit sold than a paperback), and ditch the paperbacks altogether in favour of ereaders.

But for now, the people that will invest in e-readers, or receive them this Christmas - which I feel will be the time that the UK market really wakes up to how important they will be - will be genuine read-a-holics, people passionate about the books they read and also ones who talk about books, recommend them to friends and play an important part in the word-of-mouth success garnered by bestsellers. Surely these are the people publishers should be courting?

Personally I love books. I own probably a couple of hundred, yet most, once read, end up in my loft, given to friends or donated to charity shops. I have a bookcase with maybe twenty or thirty of my favourite books on it, and that’s it. Anything else I could be re-educated to use an ereader to digest.

If you’re one of these lucky types, to already be using an e-reader and looking for something new to get your teeth into, you can download my short story collection, The New Goodbye, for free. It’s available for both the Kindle and Sony Readers, as well as the Stanza app on the iPhone and most other formats, as well as HTML for your computer screen.

I’m likely to release a revised version of my first novel through Smashwords at some point too. So keep an eye on the Veggiebox if you’re interested in that.

Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Alis for having me.

Thanks, Neil, and the very best of luck to The New Goodbye.

PS - I've just finished re-reading The Leaving Present, one of the stories I know Neil is most proud of in the collection and found it both accomplished and touching. I recommend it!View and download the whole collection here - you don't need any kind of e-reader, you can read it from your laptop or PC.

One I prepared earlier...

OK, time to 'fess up. The editing is going along pretty well but it is becoming all consuming, so here’s one I prepared earlier – like about a month ago - and forgot about! It’s a tag which originated with Nik Perring – I picked it up at Aliya Whiteley and Neil Ayres’s blog:

List at least five things you do to support and spread a love of the written word.. If you list something that touches youngsters, you get a bonus...

One:
I have a house which is apparently spawning books as we speak. Every time we think we have enough bookcases, it seems only to be a matter of days before we discover that books have begun to colonise the stairs, the windowsills, the blanket box in the living room which is supposed to house nothing but DVDs and Wii stuff - you know, you’re not supposed to put things on top of it because you can’t get at the stuff inside easily, so – obviously - there are books on it most of the time. Bedrooms, obviously are full of books, that goes without saying but bathrooms – do other people have stacks of books in their bathrooms – balancing on the side of the bath, stacked next to the loo rolls in the downstairs loo…
So, whenever anybody comes to our house they kind of have no choice but to interact with at least one book on their visit – normally so that they can sit down on anything. They’ve got to be interested in at least one, right?

Two:
For years when my children were small I read dozens of books to them – often many, many times (Cherry Tree Farm anyone? I can probably still do it off by heart all these years later.) And I wouldn’t mind but THEY DON’T REMEMBER A SINGLE ONE. They don’t remember any of the characters they loved so much. Not a word. I mention Cherry Tree Farm and Hairy McLairy and they look at me blankly. And, more to the point, once they became literate themselves they did not start reading books off their own bat. Oh no. They became uninterested in books (unless I was reading to them, which I persisted in until they were 12 and 11) until very recently. Mind you, the Bassist is now talking about reading English at university and does things like hauling off and reading the whole F Scott Fitzgerald oeuvre which is more than I’ve ever done, so maybe Cherry Tree Farm and Hairy McLary from Donaldson’s Dairy weren’t such a vain effort after all.

Three:
Despite the prevailing tendency to listen to iPods on public transport, I persist in reading books whenever I am on a train or a bus. It puts me at a disadvantage in the carrying things around stakes – iPods are little and light and books are heavier and more chunky – but do I care? No. Reading Bill Bryson in public certainly spreads the love of the written word – nobody watching me have silent, I’m-laughing-in-front-of-other-people hysterics at something he’s written could fail to get the message that books are good for you.

Four:
I am forever lending books to friends, whether they want them or not. This may be related to One, above, but I’m not going to discuss that.

Five:
I shovel ridiculous amounts of money in the direction of Watersones and – when we’re particularly broke – the local Oxfam bookshop. The latter is also the recipient of the consequences of One, above – the trouble is, we tend to go in with a rucksack full of books which we leave with them to sort and shelve, only to leave with a rucksack full of books off the shelves. Poor effort.

Anyway, hope that goes some way to making up for the very poor showing in terms of recent posts here. I shall be putting up a few thoughts on the editing process in the next couple of days… be warned.

My Secret Vice...

Neil Ayres, over at the Veggiebox which he shares with Aliya Whitely, has started a meme. It’s not one with loads of questions; in fact it has only one question – what’s your secret vice?

So far, people’s secret vices seem to be rather TV and film based. OK, I have that sort of vice too but it is AS NOTHING compared to my real vice.

Rucksacks.

Yes, rucksacks. Bags which you carry on your back, with shoulder straps. They’re everywhere now, from schoolchildren’s backs to pensioners’ garden-wandering shoulders and every kind of back in between. You can get teeny weeny little diamante encrusted numbers (except why would you?) and mammoth things which look as if they would literally hold the kitchen sink as you backpacked around the known universe. Everybody’s got one these days.

But I loved rucksacks well before all this ubiquity. I have loved them since I was thirteen and saved up my pocket money to buy my first one from my Mum’s catalogue – a grey canvas number with two outside pockets fastened with leather straps and buckles and leather shoulder straps. You pulled the thing closed with string strung through eyelet holes and buckled it up. Nobody had heard of snaplock buckles in those days. Nobody outside the American military had thought of ripstop nylon and waterproofed materials in the context of rucksacks. If you wanted things inside to stay dry, you put them in a plastic bag. Or a bin bag if you had a bigger rucksack, like the one I went around bits of Germany and Scandinavia with in my second summer at university. A huge blue karrimor beast with an external aluminium frame. I was also accompanied by my friend Jane, but she is not what this post is about.

Lots of people carry all their baby-changing paraphernalia in a rucksack now (from Mothercare, natch). I did it nineteen years ago in one from Milletts. It didn’t have a changing mat or a bottle pocket. Not that I had any time for either of those things anyway, but you get the point. If it can be carried in a rucksack, I will carry it in a rucksack.

My family is tolerant of my vice. If I don’t buy or otherwise acquire a rucksack in any given calendar year, I tend to develop a tendency to stand outside Millets, Blacks, Field and Trek or luggage shops with my little nose pressed against the window, muttering about compression straps, map pockets and attachment points. As we walk down the relevant street (in Canterbury all three outdoors shops are within 50 yards of each other – bliss or torture depending on my rucksack-affording status) one of the boys is apt to bark ‘step away from the rucksack shop, Mum!’ or take my by the arm and gently steer me away, depending on how manic the gleam in my eye is.
The Other Half is kinder, she lets me go in and stroke them.

So, for your delight and delectation, may I introduce a few of the current stars of my rucksack collection.

Cue music...

This is my current 'everyday' rucksack. Just big enough to get my little laptop into if I need to. I don't do handbags, this is as handbaggy as I get.
This one's a recent acqusition, replacing one I used for more than ten years ( I may be acquisitive, but I ain't fickle) until the main zip gave out a couple of months ago. I haven't been able to bring myself to throw out this old friend yet:

Then there's the walking rucksack for when the hiking fit is upon the Other Half and me...

...which also doubles as the 'I'm going shopping' rucksack for carrying loads of rice and stuff from the local wholefood shop.

The leather 'it's not a briefcase' rucksack:

...and the piece de resistance, the good old backpacking rucksack. This is the one I took when I went to the Reading Rock Festival last year with the Ultimate Frisbee Freak and the Bassist. It's still got the multicoloured straps i used to attach things to it...

I could go on, and on.....but as regular readers of this blog are probably already doing the cyber-equivalent of sidling away nervously and wondering whether to delete me from their favourites list, I shall desist.

I blame Neil... then again, perhaps I should have just talked about my dodgy addiction to the Archers...