First Routes to Publication Panel at Emirates Airline Festival of Literarture

I had come to do harm. I admit it. There was a tyre lever in the leg of my jeans, the cold metal a comfort to me as I readied to meet The Evil Gatekeeper. Literary agent Luigi Bonomi was responsible for at least one of the 250-odd rejections I have pasted up in the wall of My Shrine with candles lit all around them.

And now I had him, in front of an audience. On stage. A rejected author who had finally, after ten years, thrown up his hands with the publishing industry and gone it alone. An Agent. One Of Them.

Luigi Bonomi is a charming, charming man. We chatted backstage before we went on. I had also interviewed him earlier that day for Dubai Eye Radio. We quickly found we had more areas of agreement than disagreement. By the time we were ready to take to the stage at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, I had shamefacedly slipped the tyre lever into a side-cupboard.

We were joined by Dubai-based author Liz Fenwick, who is publishing her first book, The Cornish House, as part of a two-book deal with Orion and the charming Sarah Hathorn, who at thirteen self published her first book, Alexandra's Mission: Teenagent. I thought Sarah was wonderful, poised, articulate and intelligent - all qualities I know I was utterly lacking in when I was fifteen.

We talked about our stories, how we' each approached getting published and the hurdles we'd faced, the advice we'd give. The audience was clearly peppered with wannabe authors and when Q&A came, Luigi got hit with loads of 'how do we submit to you?' kindof questions. His workshop session on how to submit your work and get it published sold out and a second session had to be quickly cobbled together, showing just how popular this topic was.

And so contrary to my expectations, the session was jolly, funny and sparkled, in no small part thanks to the skills of moderator Paul Blezard. We all shuffled out and sat in our signing chairs, little pennants with our names on them. Sarah and I chatted (we bought each others' books) as the occasional person came up to us to have one or the other book signed. Liz didn't have a book to sign, hers launches on the 15th March. We gazed wistfully at Darren Shan's long, straggling queue next to us.

So that was that. All I can say is if I ever meet Luigi again, I swear I'll be unarmed...

The Book Marketing Conundrum

I’ve been involved in a long-running debate with a group of writer pals (the shadowy and feared ‘Grey Havens Gang’) about the greatest downside of self publishing for many writers – the fact it entails promoting your own work. Most writers seem to find the whole process of promotion deeply counter-intuitive, but it's increasingly the case that, regardless whether you're conventionally published or self-published, you need to drag yourself out and stand on that street corner.

I had long held out for a publisher to take up my work for two key reasons: validation and scale. A publisher signing you as a writer, so my thinking went, validates you as such. It’s now you can change your profession in your passport to ‘author’. Oh, how wrong I was to prove myself in that one. The other reason, scale, was simple. A publisher would get your onto all those shelves for all those eyeballs to see your cover and pick you up.

These turned into two of the key reasons I decided on self publishing. Firstly, I was signed up by an agent, which meant that someone who knew what they were doing considered me publishable.  This, I realised, was validation enough. Secondly, writer friends who had been signed by publishers were bitter about how little scale was actually on offer from publishers unwilling to invest in books that weren’t sure-fire supermarket sellers.

Seriously. Here’s one of the rejections of Beirut from a top London publisher:

“There are lots of elements to it that I like – there’s an austere, almost Le Carre feel which I like and the author can clearly write. The dialogue and plotting stood out for me in particular. I’m afraid though that it is – for my purposes – a bit too low-key; the ‘commercial’ bit of my job title requires me to pick out titles which are going to appeal directly to supermarkets and the mass-market, and I feel that this would be too difficult a sell in that context.”

And yet if a publisher has a single remaining attraction for authors, it is that the author can ‘get on with writing and let someone worry about the other stuff’, like formatting, editing, printing and, critically, marketing the book. It's at the marketing stage many writers find themselves being told to blog and tweet by publishers - to effectively do the heavy lifting in an online environment. The lack of focus given the 'mid-list' by the sales and marketing teams has left many writers tied to a publisher and cast adrift in the wilderness.

But as more authors turn to self publishing, there is a vast and exponentially increasing legion of writers clamouring for people’s attention. All too often, this consists of little beyond ‘read my book read my book read me book’, which soon becomes very wearying for the victims. It’s got to the point where readers on platforms such as the Kindle Forums and GoodReads are hyper-sensitive to the faintest whiff of self-promotion by authors and slam them accordingly.

So what can a writer do?

Attend my workshop at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai this Friday, of course! There I’ll be sharing tips and tricks for promoting your book and getting people to read it without just screaming repetitive promotional messages all the time. There are still seats, priced at Dhs200, and you can sign up at the handy link below. A warning before you decide to listen to what I've got to say: I'm not Amanda Hocking - the Olives project is still very much in its early days...

How to Get Noticed and Sell Your Book with Alexander McNabb
Self Publishing and Promoting Your Book in a Digital Age
Friday 9 March 17:00-19:00Al Waha, InterContinental Hotel
Tickets are available by clicking on this here handy, rinky-dink link.

(Yes, this whole post was an evilly conceived plug for my #EAFOL workshop. Sorry 'bout that... :)

Delaying Beirut

Image: Petar Milošević

I had originally intended my second serious novel, Beirut, would launch at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. I was wrong to even think that was possible.

Back when I decided to self-publish Olives, in September 2011, it all seemed simple enough: put the book up on Amazon and CreateSpace and print a local edition. I’ll gloss over all the details of permissions, ISBN numbers, printing presses, distribution and the like – if you’re interested in how to self publish your book in the UAE, you can always come along to my workshop at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on the 9th March.

But suffice it to say, a decision taken with a ready-to-go manuscript in September resulted in a book being widely available in the UAE’s bookshops in January, with reviews only starting to come in Jan/Feb and many reviewers still to give their opinion of Olives at the time I write this.

At the same time, I’m actively promoting the book, with this blog, on Twitter, with bookclubs and various signings, appearances and the like. Olives is taking about an hour out of each day right now – social media is an expensive tool if you count your cash by the second  and it’s pretty much the only tool a writer has in the Internet age. You could argue word of mouth, but that’s really what social media’s about, isn’t it?

So the plan is to work on the final edit of Beirut in April and have it submitted to the UAE’s National Media Council for Permission to Print (which I doubt it’ll get) in May. If it’s knocked back, I’ll print in Beirut, although I have to say Beirut’s chances of getting sold in Beirut are pretty slim, too. If self-publishing Olives has taught me one thing, it is that publishing novels in the Middle East is a thankless task when it comes to ‘sensitivities’ and ‘cultures of respect’.

I reckon Beirut can go to print in June at the earliest. That would mean possibly hitting the shelves in late July/early August for the holiday rush in the UAE. But distribution is a very analogue game and so’s book marketing with ‘traditional media’ reviewers. I’m probably best off getting review copies out then and keeping the book back until September for distribution, aiming at October as a public launch date.

As a self publisher straddling the analogue and digital worlds, something made necessary because Amazon, Apple et al won’t sell e-content to the Middle East, I find myself constrained by analogue, rather than Internet, time.

Which is why Beirut won’t launch at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature...

From Dubai Festival of Literature to Abu Dhabi Book Fair

March is quite a busy month one way and another. The 9th will see me infesting the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, although I’ll be around the Festival in the week without a doubt, doing my annual outside broadcast with Dubai Eye Radio, a gig I always enjoy immensely.

I'm kicking off my involvement  in the LitFest this year with a presentation to 500 pupils of the Dubai American Academy which, I have to say, is a chilling prospect at the least.

If I survive that one, I’m then scheduled to take part in a moderated session with two other writers, Liz Fenwick and Sarah Hathorn called ‘First Fictions: Three different success stories’, which aims to explore different routes to getting published – Liz is publishing her debut, The Cornish House, in  May with Orion while Sarah went self-pub back in 2010, when it wasn’t quite as fashionable as it is now. The session’s being moderated by literary agent Luigi Bonomi and should be an interesting debate on the road from ‘traditional’ publishing to today’s market-challenging publishing models.

First Fictions: Three different success stories is on Friday 9 March 15:00-16:00 at the Al Baraha 2 room at the InterContinental Hotel.

I’m also doing a workshop at the Emirates Festival on how to self publish and promote your book. As I said over at my ‘regular blog’ the other day, more and more people are taking matters into their own hands and self publishing, but it’s a unique game to play in the UAE for all manner of reasons and I’ll be extending as much help to others as I know how. I’ll also be looking at routes to digital marketing for authors, which is a problem many of us face when we’re trying to get our books ‘out there’.


Later in the month, there’s GeekFest Sharjah on the 22nd but that’s going to be an Olives Free Zone – the geeks have put up with enough of me promoting and pushing the book, they deserve a night off.

On the 27th and 28th, I’ll be in Beirut making trouble as usual at the seminal ArabNet Conference, the region’s leading – and largest - digital conference and a key event for anyone that cares about online technologies and how to use them to build cool things. I’ll be taking the opportunity to have a signing in Beirut and probably getting up to something noisy and naughty in Gemayze to celebrate Olives being on sale in Lebanon.


And then on the 29th, I’m doing a signing at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, as well as taking part in a panel session discussing the state of digital publishing in the Arab World as part of the professional programme. My co-panellists are an august bunch, so it’ll be fun to throw a brat with a pocket full of fireworks in there – and that’s precisely what I intend to be.

April 1st, I’ll have my feet up with a mug of cocoa looking forward to editing Beirut!