Learn from the greats ...

... or, since I am editing and have nothing new or finished to blog about, let me instead direct you to a recent(ish) article from The Guardian entitled Ten things I learned about writing from Stephen King. To me, "thing" seven is the crunch.

Still here? Go on, scat!

It takes one to know one (or, Stephen King questions the virtues of being productive)

You're pretty savvy, so you've probably already seen Stephen King's opinion piece for the New York Times which debates whether or not a novelist can be too productive.

Given that King himself is no slouch in this regard, it's a safe bet he knows what he's talking about. Anyway, you're here because you're interested in writing, probably, so maybe you'll find this of interest too. Here's the inevitable link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/opinion/stephen-king-can-a-novelist-be-too-productive.html

I don't really "do" memes any more but...

I don't go on Facebook much, if I can help it. I don't really "do" memes¹ on there either - it all feels a bit 2008 - but since this one is book related and I was nominated by a good friend (not just nominated, Dark Steps made it onto her list) then I thought I'd better do this. Here's the spiel. List ten books that have stayed with you, for whatever reason, then nominate others to do the same. Simple.

I've added an extra rule of my own: only one book by any given author. Anyway, in no specific order, here goes:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. You think the film is intense? Try the book. Pitch perfect prose too.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Maybe not his greatest work but this is about books that stay with you...at the time in my life I read this, I was pump-primed, ready to be flattened by this book.

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The book that speaks to me most about being a bloke (and about being a record collector).

Vox by Nicholson Baker. Famously dismissed as a "toenail paring" by Stephen King because of its brevity, Vox is proof that word count is not the be all and end all. Intimate, shocking (still), thought-provoking and very special to me. I almost swapped this choice for The Fermata, by the same author, but since I read Vox first, it (just) gets the nod here.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. An exercise in controlled horror. You've probably only seen the Will Smith vehicle, but wipe that film from your mind and savour the far-superior source material instead.

Skeleton Crew by Stephen King. I nearly chose The Stand. I nearly chose the recent (and brilliant return to form) 11.22.63. I should probably have chosen The Shining, as it's arguably his best work. But I chose this collection of short fiction instead, as it was the first King I ever read. It's probably not even King's best collection (that's Night Shift, I expect) but it does include The Mist and Mrs Todd's Shortcut. Most importantly though, it began a love affair for me that persists to this day.

Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood. If there's been a better (and more unnerving) slice of speculative fiction written in the last twenty years, I haven't seen it. Atwood is beyond compare, in my book.

The Death of Grass by John Christopher. Nowadays book shops, real and online, are awash with dystopia - everything is dystopian this and dystopian that. But this book, long out of print but now back in circulation, just pips The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham for proper, old-school dystopia.

The Outcast by Sadie Jones. I thought long and hard about whether to include this. It is a good book, of that there is no doubt. Have I read other, greater books? Yes. But this makes the because it stays with me, more than most others, because of the time in my life and the circumstances in which I read it.

Watership Down by Richard Adams. The book I have read more than any other (14 times, I think). In a book about rabbits, all human life is here.

And now a cheat, to mention a couple more books. Just bubbling under, not making the cut, Spaceship Medic by Harry Harrison, a book from my childhood, and Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, from a time in my teens when I read an awful lot of science fiction. Oh, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis which, I'd wager, stays long in the mind of anyone who reads it.

And that's it - ask me again next week and you'd probably get a different list. I know this isn't Facebook but the whole thing is about books, and this is where I write most about books, writing and reading, so it seemed relevant. If, by slim chance, we're friends in Zuckerberg's empire, I hope you don't mind the repetition.

1. Is there a verb yet that means "to 'do' a meme"? Answers on a postcard to the usual address (i.e. post a comment). Cheers.

I've looked at life from both sides (of the Atlantic) now

I looked at my Amazon.com and .co.uk author profiles yesterday specifically to see if they differ and they do, in one respect.

Over in the US, people who buy things I've written also tend to buy books by these good folk:

From my US Amazon author profile

Blimey! Stephen King, Joe Hill, Clive Barker and Dean Koontz! I'll take that, any day of the week.

In the UK, things are a little different.

From my UK Amazon author profile

Now maybe I need to get out more, because I don't think I've heard of anyone on this list. But there are two names that appear on both: Scott Nicholson and J. Thorn. I think I might investigate these guys further (though I'm really not sure about the latter's author pic...)

You mean there are rules for writing?

Well no, not really. I mean yes, of course there are tips, things that help, things that are good practice. But rules? They're all made to be broken, at some point.

Anyway, I'm not going to give you my rules - who am I, after all? But I will offer some from other authors, famous authors, successful authors. You might like them. If nothing else, this might make a nice jumping-off point for you.

Here we go.

Thirteen writing tips from Chuck Palahniuk

George Orwell’s five rules for effective writing

Jack Kerouac’s rules for spontaneous prose

Stephen King's six key rules for writing a bestseller

Stephen King's "Everything you need to know about writing successfully - in ten minutes"

And everyone else... including Elmore Leonard's famous ten rules, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Jonathan Franzen, Neil Gaiman, PD James, and more.

Edit:

Ray Bradbury's 12 pieces of writing advice to young authors (thanks Mark)

Colson Whitehead's rules for writing

David Morrell's five tips for writing thrillers and more

I'll take that!

As you may know, when you look at an author profile on Amazon there is a sidebar that shows you other authors whose books were bought by customers who bought work by the author you're looking at. I know, that's not a very elegant sentence but my point is this: today, I took a quick look at my UK author profile and that "also bought" sidebar showed this:

Yes, a whole load of authors I've never heard of, but Dean Koontz and Stephen King at the top of the "a bit like me" list? I'll take that!

The great Twitter experiment

Before this week, I had a whole 107 followers on Twitter. I know. Stephen Fry can rest easy. But then I read one of the many "how I sold thousands of copies of my self-pubbed book" articles that indie authors cling to like drowning men. As usual, it waxed lyrical on the importance of social media as a promotional tool. What was different, though, was the strategy for using Twitter that was described.

I have always been selective about who I follow on Twitter. I like a nice, uncluttered timeline to read, full only of things that are likely to interest me, written by people I have an interest in, so before this week, I only followed 77 people. But this article suggested that was where I was going wrong. It suggested I should be actively seeking followers, specifically followers of other authors who write in a similar genre or tone to me, and that I should be following them in the hope that they would follow back.

The author I most aspire to emulate is Stephen King but he's not on Twitter (yet). There are a number of King fan/news Twitter accounts though, so I picked a popular one of those (@SoStephenKing) and went after its followers.

Now Twitter imposes limits on following, in relation to how many followers you have. For average Joes like you and me, that's 2,000... so I could add nearly 1,900 people. Not something I wanted to do manually, so I used Tweepi to do it in bulk.

At the time of writing, I now follow 1,940 people... and have a mighty 337 followers. I know, not the greatest return on my investment, but let's give the experiment time. Will an increased following (just writing that makes me feel like a cult leader, but hey) translate to increased sales? Well, it hasn't yet, but it's early days. Let's give it a month and see what happens.

One positive I've noticed already is that there is a much greater international mix in those 337, judging by the sudden spike in visits to this very website. My stats tell me they're coming in from all over the world, compared to an almost exclusively British demographic before. Again, will this translate to more sales globally? Again, we'll have to wait and see. What I can tell you is that this has led me to use Twuffer to schedule tweets for when I'm in bed and the US are doing their evening surfing...

Downsides? My Twitter timeline is crammed full and too fast-moving to be of any real use. I've had to resort to using lists to follow the people I originally followed, the 77. But that's not so bad. I can live with that. My plan, such as it is, is to treat the next month as a massive Twitter experiment. Can I use it to generate sales? In a week or so I plan to unfollow all the followers of @SoStephenKing who didn't follow me back, and then follow the followers of another author, maybe David Morrell. Then rinse and repeat for other authors for the rest of the month.

Does this make me cynical? Yes, I fear it does, twisting Twitter to my own ends like a capitalist pig-dog. But I just want to sell more copies of Dark Steps and, more importantly, build a readership ready for when Drawn To The Deep End is published. Will it all work? I'll let you know.

I still get a thrill...

I walked into my local Waterstone's a couple of weeks ago (sorry, I know they have but I can't bear to dispense with the apostrophe), and what should I see on a big end-of-shelf display but this?

Three books under the heading "Books we want to shout about! Celebrate local writing talent!"... and there was Unthology No.1 from the always interesting Unthank Books.

My short story Waiting Room is in that there book... and it still gives me a thrill, albeit a little one now, more than a year after the book was published, but a thrill nonetheless to know I can walk into this bookshop, part of a national chain, and pick up a book, open it and find some words of mine inside. How must Stephen King feel?

I dream of the day I can go in and find Drawn To The Deep End filed under 'P' in fiction. Guess I'll need to finish the damn thing first though...