#50@50 You can do it!!

How to write 65 000 words in a month

So Black Crake Books is going to publish 50 manuscripts for Free!!

You know you have a good story in your head. You know you have been waiting for the right time to start typing this masterpiece, but you have always found that you do not have the time to write. You work from 8am till 5pm and you get home exhausted. You start scratching your head wondering where to start but end up sleeping on the sofa in front of the TV instead of getting a few words down.

Here are a few pointers that will help you reach 65 000 words in a month.

Hard work

One thing you need to know is that the book is not going to write itself. You are not going to wake up one day and find all the chapters neatly stacked on the table waiting for you to read through them and submit. This isn’t a fairy tale, there is no Rumpelstiltskin. Writing needs concentration, a colourful imagination and hard work. You will have to spin dry words into a string of beautiful golden sentences that will attract readers and have them begging for more.

Determination

Do you want to be the next Mark Twain, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen? All of these authors have one thing in common. They had determination - They were determined to have their stories told. You have a beautiful story. Black Crake Books is giving you a once in a lifetime opportunity to have it published. To have your name in the list of famous authors.

Schedule

From the day we were born we were all allotted the same amount of time to use in the day. How we choose to use it, though, is up to us. If you are hardworking and determined you will always find the time to write your story. You can buy time from ‘time.’ The time you spend watching television is time you could be using to write. The time you use to browse the internet, take selfies, post pictures is time that you can use writing. Make a schedule that works for you. Wake up half an hour before your normal time and write. After work set aside two hours before going to bed and write. If you spend at least 2 hours 30 minutes a day writing you can reach the 65 000 words in a month. In fact you would have 70 000 words. So, is 65 000 words achievable? To the lazy the answer is no. But to the truly determined and hardworking, the answer is YES!

Motivation

All writers are acquainted with writer’s block. Although they are hardworking, have the determination and the schedule to produce the work they lack the inspiration. The words just simply refuse to be written, like a petulant child that refuses to eat their vegetables. What can help? Reading other books. Writers are readers. They collect words. Writers are travellers. You don’t have to book a ticket to paradise, but you can imagine it. Make your mind travel. Free your imagination by daydreaming. What also motivates writers to keep writing is day to day activities. Authors are observant. They study people’s mannerisms, accents, attitudes, tones, smells, attire and many other things. Try this exercise – walk to town and watch people. Watch how they interact. Watch how they walk, how they talk, scream and shout. Watch their facial features, and their stance. Their hair styles and their garb. Give each individual a story, and you will find your creative juices flowing. Goodbye writer's block.

Can you produce a manuscript by the end of September 2016? Black Crake Books says, ‘Yes you can!  

Image source – inconosqure.com

50@50

In celebration of Botswana's 50th Anniversary of Independence we are launching #50@50, a campaign to publish 50 of Botswana's best books.

Why isn't my Kindle eBook making money?

OK you’ve done all the hard work; years of actually writing the damn thing followed by years of rejection letters from publishers and more recently months of online research and agonising over whether or not to self-publish online. But you took the plunge and joined millions of other authors on Amazon’s Kindle platform. In the end it was pretty easy, apart from the IRS tax bit, and now you can check sales as often as you like!! Only there’s a snag – in your mind’s eye you secretly dreamed of being pleasantly surprised by how well your book was doing but you forgot to brace yourself for the worst case scenario – not selling any copies. None in the first week. None in the first month. None in the first twelve months. None at all in fact.

But you haven’t given up yet and now you’re a Kindle junkie, devouring all the online blogs and webinars about how to make your book more visible and more successful. But what if you’ve done all that? What if you changed your cover, updated the categories, improved your keywords, dropped the price and tweaked your actual content to make it more Kindle compatible, and still saw no sales spike? Surely it’s time to give up?

Maybe not. Let me share what I’ve learned about being on Kindle since 2011. And before I do that let me share my personal opinion about writing which is that you can still consider yourself a writer without being rich and successful; you write every day, and all day you think about writing and how to make the next book better, you never go anywhere without your Moleskine notebook? You are a writer. Maybe not a professional writer, but a writer nonetheless, and with the advent of Kindle the definition of what exactly constitutes a professional writer probably needs redefining. There are thousands of good writers who are not successful, and thousands of bad writers who have tasted success!! Don’t you just hate them? I know I do.

If you don’t live in the USA and buy a lot of books online on your Kindle are you really qualified to know much about what makes the brain of the average Kindle reader (customer) tick? No, you aren’t. So it’s time to rationalise. Take a deep breath and take a break. Regroup. It’s still not too late.

If you’re anything like me you made a lot of mistakes with your first Kindle books and left them uncorrected for several years. In short, like me, you were naïve and ignored the good advice which is actually readily available on the Kindle site itself in the instructions but it’s only with hindsight that things like the searchable Table of Contents become important. Only after years of no sales do you start to think that maybe your name plus the names of your book’s characters are not good keywords. No one who’s never read your book is going to accidentally search for these terms in the Kindle Store.

Leave the first book where it is and write a new one. Actually writing again will be therapeutic and now you know much more than you did last time. Make it better, more commercial with a title and a cover that will attract the attention of readers who’ve never heard of you. Go for it!! Channel that frustration into a new project and see how much better than the last one it does.

I’m a big fan of some of the Kindle Conventional wisdom – like DIY Book Covers.com for example, he talks a lot of sense. BUT be warned, the bottom line on most of these guru sites is that you should give away your writing for free in order to build an audience and get return – paying – customers. I disagree. My experience of Free book promotions and Kindle Countdown Deals is that they are a waste of time, unless you are going to dedicate a serious amount of your time to promoting each new discount deal on one of several dedicated websites some of which are not free. What a palaver!! Is that why you became a writer? No, I don’t think so. Stick to your guns. Believe in yourself and your book. If the bestselling books in your genre are all $9.99 why not stick at $9.99. If they’re more like $3.99, go for $3.99 instead.

And wait. Find a friend or family member who can buy your book and hopefully post a 5-star review. That one review and one sale will give you a kickstart. The rest might be in the lap of the gods but at least you’ve got a foot in the door!!

Nick Green is the author of Boathouse to Botswana, Three Journeys to Patagonia and Tezcatlipoca’s Dream…he is the publisher of My Forever Heartache 

 

Sub-Saharan Independent Publisher v. The Whole World

It is suddenly a world of landing pages and click funnels; new releases are simply invisible in amongst the bestsellers. Browsers cannot find your book accidentally unless it already has several five-star reviews to its name. And your family and friends are tired of you asking them for reviews. To get your Kindle eBook noticed in amongst the millions of other titles is harder than ever before. Is it even possible to take on the USA from outside it? Can you publish or self-publish in Sub-Saharan Africa and expect success if you're not affiliated to Penguin South Africa? Shouldn't we all just give up?
Here I'm reminded of an eminent Professor at the University of Botswana who reminded me that poetry's purpose, like folk music's, is to scare the establishment, to change governments. In times of revolution it is our words that give the multitudes a voice. That is why I don't give up, and why I refuse to write the kind of book that apparently sells millions of copies - be it a romance novel complete with picture of topless man and his sweaty six-pack, or a self-help book about how to publish your book on Amazon. I mean seriously? Are Amazon championing the little guy here, or simply pyramid-peddling fool's gold?
As an independent publisher in Botswana it's sometimes pretty daunting to take on the whole world and the might of the established bestsellers at the same time but if we keep supporting each other we can do it!! We are busy improving our Kindle eBook products across the whole range, to incorporate new covers, searchable tables of contents and a Black Crake Books page for readers to stay in touch and receive special offers plus new, unpublished free materials. In the meantime it is only through reader reviews, sharing posts, tagging friends, recommending books to friends, that our titles slowly migrate from invisible to visible-and-trending. My recommendation? Tezcatlipoca's Dream - well worth a look.

Write of Abode - From Newlyweds to Refugees

At the end of our ten-day honeymoon on the island of Hydra, my wife and I took the Flying Dolphin back to the mainland as many star-crossed lovers had done before us. In Piraeus we stayed at the Hotel Triton – an old standby – and had our last Greek meal which, like most Greek meals, was terrible but unforgettable nonetheless. Before going to bed we rambled around the block admiring homemeade soaps, sponges from the ocean, giant sacks of drying and dried herbs, there were fish shops, and magazine-porn-selling kiosks and a chocolate shop with a talking parrot. A large demonstration of some sort complete with TV cameras and police escort marched on the capital. A decision was due on the Euro deal with Germany and politics was rife in the air.

The next morning as we waited for the airport bus by the statue of Karaiskakis outside the church, we saw for the first time dozens of Syrian refugees on the grass. They had obviously spent the night in this little park and were in various stages of waking up and getting up but all under the gaze of the Athens public going to work – many of whom were just as surprised to see them as we were. We’d all heard about it on the news but now here they were, people like us whose country had suddenly been plunged into a war that the rest of the world didn’t know or care about. The women and children had blankets and there was water at least from a public bathroom block but the men made do with what they stood up in and stoically smoked. One family with three kids in tow made their way bravely to the middle of the intersection with their possessions tied in a cumbersome see-through plastic sack. It was like a scene from a movie except we were not in New York and, one suspects, there was no fairy tale ending.

We smiled politely and tried not to stare and wondered what we could do to help. We did not know at the time that we were a) pregnant and b) about to become refugees of sorts ourselves.

I’ve long been interested in immigration law. In Botswana there’s a big refugee camp near Dukwi housing thousands of refugees from not only Southern and Eastern Africa but all over the continent. Put up as tents in 1978 it is now something of a small town with houses and infrastructure. As a teenage humanist and idealistic sixth-former I knew in my heart that I cared passionately about people’s rights to three things; free education, free health care, and freedom of movement. I was soon to discover as I got older that none of these things can be taken for granted. The one I thing I clung to as I travelled the world and lived life as an expat in various enclaves was the knowledge that if everything went wrong I could at least go home to England.

Yet now I am forced to reckon with the reality that not even the latter statement can be taken for granted any more. What then has gone wrong? Have I and many others like me been naïve for all these years or has the world suddenly become extremely paranoid and xenophobic? Does it not look and feel like the political climate that presaged the Second World War?

If we as British citizens cannot rely on the benevolence of our own state, if we are not free to come and go as we please with our spouses and children, what then is left? My wife and I cannot afford to have our baby in the UK and she does not qualify for free NHS treatment even though we are legally married (our child would be allowed NHS treatment after birth apparently). We can only apply if I am normally resident and earning more than GBP 22, 400.00. Until then she (and our child when it is born) will have to wait elsewhere. Can the law really discriminate against non-EEA spouses and children in such a way?

In another twist that it won’t do to go into here, although my wife is Zambian and we were married there, I do not qualify for a work visa just as she would not get one automatically in England. In Botswana where we met and still live, I have work papers but a recent change in the interpretation of the labour law means that I lost my job. So, like many other couples, we are forced to live apart until the immigration minefield can be negotiated.

My Life in (Three) Books

   

The day I came closest to death, I fell asleep high up a remote volcano in Ecuador, reading Moby Dick, in Spanish. I'd been reading the English edition for several weeks already, but it was stolen on the road. The Spanish edition fell into my lap, and later into my bag, at a backpackers' along the way. Whilst Moby Dick saved my life, Kitchen Confidential and In Patagonia both changed my life, in very different but equally beneficial ways.

         Anthony Bourdain's cult classic (excuse the cliche) was given to me in hardback on the day of British publication by a very good friend who, at the time, was head chef in a restaurant I managed. I ate every word (pun included), and found myself asking why nobody from the front of house was ever in the limelight? I read Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and wrote my own catering memoir as a result.

         And so, Wayne, out of the blue bought me and gave me a book that would become a Bible for years to come.

         Years earlier it was a friend Alice, herself the step-daughter of Ian McEwan (whose Amsterdam Wayne would also give me - again in hardback), who handed In Patagonia to me once she'd finished it, as the truck we were in rumbled south from Rio de Janeiro, headed towards Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego.

         

         Nick Green is the author of several books, all published by Black Crake Books. He lives in Botswana with his wife, Princess.

www.blackrakebooks.com

New-world Devilry and 2016!!

As a business owner, I often ask myself how we can improve our products, connect with a bigger audience, and increase sales. Of course, having a good product is only half the battle, people must know it's out there. Online markets are controlled and driven by Facebook and Amazon. Success blogs - How I quit my job after my book sold 350, 000 copies in one weekend - are as ubiquitous as get-rich-quick schemes. We all know this, yet this is the world we live in, and as publishers and authors are forced to face. In fact, for all its devilry, it knocks the socks off the old-school industry with its close-knit community of publishers and agents bent only on breaking a certain type of 'new' author and continually rehashing old ones. I like Googling Black Crake Books to see what's happening out there, and when I receive notification that someone in Germany or Australia is reading Three Journeys to Patagonia or Boathouse to Botswana, I am thrilled, even if I have only earned two dollars. It's all about persistence and self-belief.
For the new year we have several big things planned: First, we are going traditional and printing tree books to go into book shops; I know, call us old fashioned!! Second, we are going to raise our international profile by visiting book fairs in Europe and elsewhere; if you are interested in buying foreign rights for any of our titles please get in touch. Also in the pipeline are a poetry-only imprint, and a new Oxford/Botswana female detective novel.
Have a wonderful end-of-festive season and a Happy New Year!! See you online in 2016...NRHG XXxx