JUNE

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26Q3

The end of June marks the end of Bellmason Books’ third quarter, and it was our worst so far. Sales of The Quanta-B Tales have been non-existent, mainly due to their being no marketing budget for the quarter. This proves that marketing does indeed work, or rather it doesn’t if you don’t do any.

Marketing is something that a lot of writers struggle with (as if struggling with writing wasn’t enough), and I’ve been hearing stories from other authors who have had to learn how to become travelling salesmen and literally walk the streets finding outlets for their work. Even major publishers now are leaving the marketing of books to their creators, and there is a certain logic to that, but it has to be bad for the industry as a whole.

With more and more books being released each year, many from independent authors, it’s getting harder and harder to make your book stand out. There’s also a dichotomy inherent in the fact that publishers want books that fit neatly into categories that have a proven track record; how are you supposed to stand out at the same time as you’re trying to make your work fit into the most popular category?

Even before sitting down to write you’re now required to research the market you’re intending to sell into so that you can chase the latest fad or popular sub-category within your chosen genre. To maximise sales your book needs to tick certain boxes so it can have all the necessary hashtags associated with it.

I do not write like this and may never do so, though I haven’t entirely given up on my dream of becoming a professional author with an agent and a traditional publisher. I am not interested in chasing readers that may or may not exist, and prefer instead to write the kind of books that I would like to read.

Looking forward I will hopefully be able to chuck a bit more cash on the fire and do some big promotions. I have big plans for Q4 and quietly in the background I have been working on a couple of projects that should see Bellmason Books increase its catalogue of available titles. The long-term plan is to be able to learn enough to publish other people’s work. If you have a project that you’d like to publish then please get in touch.

FRANCE

At the end of May me and my Mum went to visit our friend in France, who lives in Brittany. This is a region of France I haven’t visited before, but I can recommend it to anyone who’s interested in history as it has a lot of connections with Britain, as the name suggests.

It was once independent from the Kingdom of France and home to the Breton people who, along with the Irish, Welsh and Scottish are part of the six Celtic nations. Like the Welsh, the Breton have retained their own language and signs in the region are presented in both French and Breton, and the language is also taught in schools.

The connection with the UK has always puzzled me and I was surprised to learn that one of their saints was actually from Wales. St. Cado (Cadoc) was a sixth century monk from Glamorgan who built a chapel on a small island in Brittany. There are also several megalithic sites in Brittany, similar to Stone Henge.

Then there’s the food! The region is famous for its butter, and cakes, which we ate a lot of. We also had a visit from our hosts other friends who are from the neighbouring region of Normandy (Vikings), but unfortunately they didn’t speak any English so if there was any rivalry between the Normans and the Breton we didn’t really get to hear about it.

For me the experience was a bit like a school trip, with most of our trips revolving around historical sites that I would not normally visit. When in a foreign country I tend to like visiting the industrial areas and truck stops so I can make fun of their health and safety procedures, but I suppose I am once again in a minority.

We were planning to drive to our friend’s house, but the rising fuel prices made it unfeasible. Both the cost of the ferry and the fuel we’d need for the 1,000 mile round trip would have been extremely high, so we instead flew with Ryan Air. I will perhaps save the account of our flights out and back for another time as they will take up almost as much of your time reading about them as they did ours experiencing them. Suffice to say that we made it there and back.

COUNT ZERO

I started reading this book around the end of March after a quiz night at Starbase Leicester. One of the rounds was based on the first lines of famous novels, and of course Neuromancer’s famous ‘the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel’ came up. This prompted a conversation with guy sitting next to me about the Neuromancer tv series currently being made by Apple, and that set me off down the whole Cyberpunk rabbit hole for a couple of months. (See also my trip to see Akira). When I got home I downloaded Cyberpunk 2077 to my console and looked out my collection of William Gibson novels.

Count Zero is the second novel in the Sprawl trilogy, and some say the weakest. I don’t find Gibson hard to read at all, quite the opposite; his prose style is so fluidic that the eyes rolls across the text and absorbs it like neon lights on a skyscraper. I do find his stories somewhat hard to follow, however. His habit of splitting chapters between three or four characters often annoys me to the point of having to go through the entire book and mark out which character is in which chapter so I can read each storyline uninterrupted. I don’t know why this bothers me so much because it’s exactly the way tv shows and films present their narratives, but perhaps it’s the density of the description and the torturous nature of the plot lines that makes it so hard to follow more than one character at a time.

The irony to all this dense description is that the book is fairly slow in terms of story. Very little happens in the first two thirds of the book and all of the characters seem to plod through the events leading up to the last third, where everything kind of connects. I can see why this book draws so much criticism about pacing, but the world-building more than makes up for it.

What really interests me though is the style of Gibson’s writing. He’s been described as the Raymond Chandler of sci-fi, and his style is ultra-focused on tiny details and includes all five senses. There’s also a journalistic quality to it that lends his stories a sort of matter-of-factness. Often characters’ emotions will be described from the point of view of an outside observer, and presented in a way that leaves the reader to make up their own mind about how to feel.

For the most part Count Zero made me feel an aching nostalgia for an eighties view of a future that never happened. His work is prescient in many respects, with corporations replacing governments. Money flows inexorably upwards to an elite few who become godlike in their power to cheat mortality and morality. Whole families live in orbit, floating in suspended animation while others survive in vats waiting for the moment when their consciousness can be downloaded into a donor body.

I have tried to study his style and incorporate some of his techniques into my own work, a bit like a drummer might sit and listen to Stewart Copeland to try and copy his style. Incidentally, Gibson came up with one of the best quotes by any author ever on a radio programme in the UK called The Verb. He said something like ’I use the oven gloves of science fiction to examine the casserole of the twenty-first century.’

ADOBE CREATIVE CLOUD

As I’ve been waiting for the sale of my house to go through, I am seeing an ever expanding list of projects that I’m having to put on hold while I waited for the money I needed to start them. Part of the problem is that all the software I used to create the first run of the Quanta-B Tales has gone out of date. Any new books I want to publish will therefore require an updated version of the Adobe software, and that means paying for a subscription (or resorting to piracy).

There are alternatives to all these Adobe programmes of course, but I don’t know enough about them to know which ones are any good. The other problem is that I was trained on Adobe software like Illustrator and InDesign which are both very complicated and take a lot of getting used to. The keyboard shortcuts are burned into my synapses now after almost two decades of using them, and the amount of effort it would need to relearn everything is effort that I need to put into the projects themselves.

Another reason for sticking with Adobe products, despite the eye-watering price, is that these applications are still the industry standard, though for how much longer is anyone’s guess. If I want to get better at using them I need to keep practicing.

So at the end of June I took the plunge and signed up to a yearly subscription of Adobe Creative Cloud. They start you out on a free 7-day trial, then you get a discount for the first three months, before the monthly price doubles. I used to fly helicopters for £300 an hour in the belief that I could one day become a commercial pilot and earn back my initial outlay. Things did’t quite work out that way however, but I didn’t still learn my lesson. (For the sake of clarity I did learn my lesson on how to fly a helicopter, in case you were thinking of going on a flight with me.)

Now I’m retired, one of the things I’m thinking of doing is teaching Photoshop. I don’t know what the current tuition rates are, but I’d be willing to show up at your house for an hour or two and show you all the tricks I’ve learned. Another line of work I’m considering is printing up original artwork to sell in shopping centres, maybe even taking commissions if someone wants a funky poster of their dog or an artistic rendering of their favourite pig (no, not that kind of rendering).

If I do manage to make some cash from using Adobe I will of course be able to claim the subscription as a cost and maybe even make some kind of profit, which I can then use to fly helicopters.

One of the first things I did after I downloaded the creative suite was to go over to the Texture Labs website and download some plugins and actions. I’ve been watching their tutorials for years, but have always been unable to follow them because my old copy of Photoshop didn’t do half the things I needed it to do. I’ve been working through some of their tutorials this week and trying out some funky new graphics. A couple of projects I’m working on now require graphics and this will be a good way to up my game.