Nick Bryan

self-publishing update

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – NOW IN PRINT

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So, after a few weeks of slow roll-out, the final step of publication is here: my first book The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is now in print! Next time, I may try and do it all at once for maximum impact, but this time, here it is a week later.

Basically: it’s a darkly comic London crime novel, the first in the Hobson & Choi series. More details about the book, along with enthusiastic review quotes and such, on our very own official Hobson & Choi homepage.

But long story short, the print edition is available from Amazon here, or the Big Green Bookshop if you happen to be in London (and I’ve remembered to give them some stock).

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – Week One

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So, it’s been a week since The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf debuted on all major ebook platforms, and how has it been? Have I done anything other than check my sales stats? How good are those stats?

And, yes, the print edition is hovering steadily into existence – look, there’s a picture of it off to the right next to a cup of coffee.

It’s a strange experience, having work out there and in the hands of people other than me. You might be one of those readers, and if so, I hope you are enjoying it – considered doing a review somewhere?

If you’re not yet a my-book owner, here’s the original post with the buy links.So, here are my observations, other happenings, a short video, a linked preview of the actual book and anything else I can squeeze in…

Bad Breakfast – Director’s Cut Edition

Want to read a short snippet of the classic Bad Breakfast Hobson & Choi chapter, re-edited for the all-new novel edition? Well, as luck would have it, you can see it on Chele Cooke’s blog now, in a guest post I prepared.

Chele’s been a great source of advice in the publishing of this book, and I’ll be repaying the favour in a few days, as her second action-scifi book is about to come out. You can grab her first one for free here.

Pretty Rank

Of course, my main leisure activity has become checking my sales figures, and I can confirm they’ve been… alright. The expected first-day rush, followed by a slow trickle since then. Hopefully I can convert this into a bigger stampede of strangers – as I said earlier, if any of you who already like my stuff fancy doing a review on Amazon/Goodreads/your blog, it would be of vast use.

In the meantime, I managed one big rank-based achievement, and here’s a picture of it:

Number two in two separate categories! Firstly, Dark Comedy, which is one of my main genres and therefore an excellent personal achievement. And second, it’s…. yeah, Irish Crime Fiction.

Just to be clear, there is no Ireland or Irish people in Hobson & Choi. This is an Amazon labelling issue which appears to have now been resolved.

But hey, if I sold a few extra copies to the Irish crime fanbase before that, all the better. Strong start.

Fresh Prints of Vid-Share

The print edition is so close that… to be honest, I could probably have stalled the release a week or two and launched both at once, but I wanted to be out there by Nine Worlds, the weekend after this.

As things stand, barring a total godforsaken catastrophe, we are 1-2 days processing away from the print edition being fully live. There will be a blog post about that soon, along with a nice big picture of the lovely full wraparound cover.

And that, I think, is it. For those of you waiting for the print edition, not long to go now.

OUT NOW IN EBOOK: The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – Hobson & Choi: Case One

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The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is out in ebook!

This is the first volume in the Hobson & Choi series, a crime saga with a heavy twist of dark comedy. It shows how my two mismatched detectives begin bickering, whilst also solving their first murder. This involves Twitter, a wolf and food – loads of food, in fact.

I’ll include the full blurb in the remainder of this post, but for those who have heard the H&C sales pitch a bunch of times, let’s cut to the all-important buy-buttons. Hope you enjoy the book, I’m very proud of it, and if you do go for it, consider reviewing it somewhere, be it Amazon, other book-buying sites, the book’s Goodreads page, your own blog, social media, or anywhere else which lets you have a book-opinion.

And remember, if you’ve read Case One on the H&C webserial already, there is an eight thousand word book-exclusive bonus story here to make it worth your while. Print book fans – that edition shouldn’t be too far away now. Proof is en route for my approval.

The Full Sales Pitch

“If we get 400 followers, John Hobson will solve that nasty wolf-murder case for free! Fight the thing himself if he has to! #HobsonVsWolf!”

Angelina Choi was only trying to drum up some Twitter followers and make a good impression on her first day interning at John Hobson’s one-man detective agency.

But the campaign went viral and now they have a murder to solve, no money coming in, and an unwilling Hobson faced with battling some enormous beast.

With both follower and body counts rising, can they crack the case without offending everyone or being eaten by a huge dog?

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is the first case starring Hobson & Choi, a bickering, mismatched detective duo for 21st century London. This book collects the debut storyline of the hit darkly comic crime web serial, extensively rewritten and improved for this definitive edition.

Also included: book-exclusive bonus story The Left Hand Is Always Right, grim tale from a dark corner of Hobson & Choi’s London – The Left Hand, budget pub of crime.

Even more details on the dedicated Hobson & Choi homepage! If you have any unanswered questions about anything Girl-Who-Tweeted-Wolf-related, email me and we’ll hopefully be able to come to some accord.

Thank you and goodbye for now. I’m off to enjoy the day. In case the buttons up top didn’t work for anyone, here are all those book-buy links in old-fashioned text form.

The Man Who Tweeted Plugs – Last Stop Before Publication Junction

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The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf, my first effort in self-publishing books, emerges on Tuesday into the world of ereaders! The cover is off to the right, and if you want even more details, review opportunities and the like, this blog post has you covered.

But if you’re interested in some project news, or in what sort of thing fills the days of a man when his book is on the verge of people-powered publishing, here’s the latest update. Probably the last major one before release day. Includes video content. Gasp. Best read on.

Let the internet be your robot butler

First up, because I gotta sell books somehow so should put these in before anyone loses interest. You can now pre-order the book on a couple of e-outlets, in case you want to make sure it appears on your device ASAP.

Here are those links:

And that’s it for now. Makes it all seem pretty real, eh?

Start the presses!

Still only the ebook versions coming out next Tuesday, but progress continues on the print edition, which is going to be lovely. I’ve approved the back cover and the proof version is scheduled to arrive with me a week or so after the ebook comes out.

So, in the event I haven’t fucked up substantially, I’ll hopefully be able to approve that and get that up for your ordering pleasure as well. Or, if there are major mistakes, alas we must wait another two weeks.

But yes, print fans, it is coming. I would’ve waited until both were good to go, but I wanted to make sure I had the e-version launched for when I went to Nine Worlds in a few weeks. If everything goes flawlessly, we may have both for that. Score.

My card, anyone?

I have new business cards for the book release! Not overly exciting for you maybe, but I just wanted to show off the design I did for the back because I think it came out quite well – it’s just above this section. The front is the book cover. Come and say hello at Nine Worlds and I may give you one of these cards.

A series writer’s work is never done

So, amid all this admin, I’ve managed to find some writing time! And what am I working on? Well, among other things, the Hobson & Choi Case Two book edition!

After all, the big thing they told me at London Book Fair was to keep building up the series, so I’d best crack on. Coming to you… either late 2014 or early 2015, hopefully. It’s scary how fast time disappears with these big projects.

And that, I suppose, is that. Depending on time and inspiration, I may not blog again until publication day. Get your two pounds ready folks, it’s gonna be good.

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – Hobson & Choi: Case One! Cover! Blurb! Release date!

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So. In the not-too-distant future, the first case of Hobson & Choi, my mismatched detective duo London crime series with a darkly comic tone, will be self-publishing. I have a nice cover, a sales blurb-type-thing, a new title, a release date, and I am about to declare all of those things.

Exciting stuff. Probably best to just get on with it. First up, then, is the real meat: cover and blurb time.

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf

“If we get 400 followers, John Hobson will solve that nasty wolf-murder case for free! Fight the thing himself if he has to! #HobsonVsWolf!”

Angelina Choi was only trying to drum up some Twitter followers and make a good impression on her first day interning at John Hobson’s one-man detective agency.

But the campaign went viral and now they have a murder to solve, no money coming in, and an unwilling Hobson faced with battling some enormous beast.

With both follower and body counts rising, can they crack the case without offending everyone or being eaten by a huge dog?The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is the first case starring Hobson & Choi, a bickering, mismatched detective duo for 21st century London. This book collects the debut storyline of the hit darkly comic crime web serial, extensively rewritten and improved for this definitive edition.

Also included: book-exclusive bonus story The Left Hand Is Always Right, grim tale from a dark corner of Hobson & Choi’s London – The Left Hand, budget pub of crime.

The What-When-How

So, that’s the what. Next important bit of news, I suppose, is when: The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf will be out on Tuesday July 22nd 2014 in electronic formats. It might take a day or two to get through to all of them, but I’m aiming to be up on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, iBooks and whatever else Smashwords will punt me onto.

For print users, there is a standard paper edition coming in August just as soon as I’ve finished back-and-forthing with proofs. Rest assured, I’ll try my best to make a big deal out of that too.

“But what about me, Nick?”

If you want to get involved now, The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is up on Goodreads so you can add it to your to-read list and such. Also, if you have a book-review blog or enjoy posting reviews on Amazon/Goodreads/anywhere else book reviews are posted (or both of the above), email me and I may be able to sort out a proof e-copy of the book for consideration in truthful review.

In a similar vein, if you have a blog/other outlet and want to get even more involved, I am well up for talking about the release anywhere that will have me. For discussion of guest posts etc, just email me. I’m sure we can work out some kind of fair arrangement.

And if you want some new H&C material right the hell now, you can still get a complete two-thousand word done-in-one (not part of this book, an entirely standalone new thing) by signing up to my mailing list here or via the form which should appear in the right sidebar of this blog. This will, as you may have guessed, guarantee you an email when I publish The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf.

That’s probably it for now – if I’ve missed any crucial details, let me know in whatever medium pleases you. For now, let’s just take another look at the cover in attractive 3D-rendered form. Thanks to Design For Writers for their lovely work on the actual design, by the way – do contact them if you need anything similar, they’re good.

Doin’ HTML Till The Break Of Dawn – Technical Self-Publishing Time

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MAXIMUM HTML

I have been locked in my room at my tiny corner desk, working on the process of turning my upcoming self-published book into beautiful HTML. It has taken a long time. I can neither confirm nor deny that I was up at 4AM Thursday morning, listening to the birds tweeting outside (and, for once, not tweeting much myself) working on exciting tasks such as reinserting italics.

As you may gather from this nuts-and-bolts self-pub stuff, the day of the Hobson & Choi release is getting very close now. So close, in fact, that I may put the cover up next week, announce the title, blurb, maybe even a date. I’m 90% sure that will happen.

But for now, here’s a blog post about the experience of processing a book into HTML. This is not a walkthrough, because there are plenty of those and I don’t have sufficient advice to justify bringing another one into the world. The posts I used to guide me was this one by Guido Henkel, it’s pretty comprehensive.

Hyper Tricky

First and foremost: yes, turning a whole book into HTML by hand is very boring and fiddly. To be honest, If I didn’t already have a basic working knowledge of the language from my day job in IT and working on various online projects, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. And if I had, it would have taken an eternity and come out terribly.

Having said that, it is not impossible. Even if I do have an advantage by writing on a comparatively short book (approx 50,000 words), it can be done without giving over weeks of your life. Yes, you will eventually need to trawl through your entire document for something and it will be dull, but the clever use of find/replace gets you a lot of the way. That Henkel walkthrough contains a lot of top tips in that direction.

In my case, my undoing was the em-dash/dash distinction and also the repeated tweaks to how I styled chapter-heads. In fact, you know what was the biggest pain? Persuading the table of contents to work in all formats. I only included it as a bonus anyway, I’m not sure fictional books really need one. C’est la vie, readers.

Still, I’m determined to take a stab at competing with other ebooks, and doubt an automated Word conversion was going to do it. Which meant either paying someone to do a decent conversion or launching into HTML myself.

Those of you with unlimited budgets and a hatred of technical nitpicking should definitely get someone else to do it for you. You’re not any more or less of an author if you can’t do HTML, after all. Much like I didn’t do my own cover design because I’m not a graphic designer.

(My cover design is great, by the way. Excited to blog it up next week.)

Mind-your Language

But for those of us who into this shit, there’s something weirdly fulfilling about building something and seeing it slowly take shape. It’s not dissimilar to the writing process itself, only much quicker and with the added perk of specific instructions and an easy way to determine whether you’ve succeeded.

And I think I’ve done okay, although this is my first time through, alright? So if I end up finding some enormous mistake when I go live and it turns into A Storm Of Stress, I reserve the right to recant this positive tone and start using phrases like “living motherfucking nightmare”.

For now, though, this feels like a moment of calm. A brief pause between the worries of “Oh god, have I done enough editing?” and the later panic of “Oh god, is anyone going to buy it now?”

So that’s nice. I can save loads of money on holidays in the future by just giving myself massive amounts of HTML to edit, can’t I? I’ve already got plans to do the second H&C volume in the not-too-distant future, so don’t worry, I’ve got plenty to do. Please do not send me your HTML parsing tasks – unless you are willing to pay for my time, in which case absolutely get in touch.

I think we’ve covered my emotions about HTML editing in enough detail to keep even the keenest of web-therapists happy. Join me next week for more hard facts about the release. Exciting, eh?