Launch of Mahrie - a Crime Novella

I am very pleased to announce the release of my first novella in the Snapshots series. The story is about Mahrie, a devoted wife and mother, who on the same fateful day buries her son and realises her husband's frequent infidelities. The result is an eighteen stone body on the kitchen floor.

Mahrie doesn't want to get caught, not just for the sake of her freedom, but to prevent what she has done tarnishing the heroic name of her son. Disposing of her husband's body isn't going to be easy though. Especially with a young Detective Boer on the case.

As an Independent publisher your opinion is everything. Every penny of profit is invested in producing the same high quality in future books. The best way to support my writing or provide feedback, is to leave a review on Amazon. It doesn't need to be long, just honest.

Mahrie is now available worldwide from Amazon as a Kindle download. I hope you enjoy.

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KDP Promotion February 2013

I ran a KDP promotion at the beginning of February for Chasing Innocence. This video is about what happened. It's my first Chasing Innocence promo video and although it may not show, the culmination of many hours practising video editing.

KDP Price Point

During the nine months since Chasing Innocence was published it has been priced as low as .99p and as high as £4.99 At the higher end I didn't sell anything for two weeks and lost my nerve. At £3.45 I sold two books in two weeks and lost my nerve again. On Amazon's 35% scheme and CI priced at .99p I sold quite a few books each day but made less than I did if I raised the price to £1.53, which qualifies me for Amazon's 70% profit scheme.

Promoting my book for free saw a huge number of downloads but I can't see that it resulted in a lot of reads. The yardstick is the feedback and interaction I get from a small percentage of readers. If I run free promotions this drops off despite the high number of downloads. The highest volume of feedback comes when the book is priced at .99p, possibly because the reader feels they really got value for money.

The only problem with the .99p price point is profit. I'm an Independent Publisher who prides himself in producing commercial quality product, which comes with a cost overhead. I need to make enough money from sales to bring the same quality to future books and I'm not going to do that with 30p profit from each sale.

In the last month Chasing Innocence has received quite a lot of publicity due to its Best Indie Thriller short-listing by the Kindle Book Review. Working with the remarkable Melissa Foster all the shortlisted books were wrapped up in a campaign and resulted in a lot of sales at the higher price point of £1.99/$2.99. This taught me something else. That a book will sell at a higher price as part of a campaign and that sales will drop off soon after. Right now I barely have enough time to write, let alone market Chasing Innocence. If I spent my time marketing I'd not have a sequel to deliver in 2013. Until I can free up some time I have to focus on creating a body of work and price CI at a level that appeals to the passing reader. I've tested various price points in trying to find a balance between .99p and no profit and the £1.99 people only pay if they've already decided they want it.

£1.53 seems to hit that mark, resulting in steady sales without marketing. Giving me the time to conjure book two. Unfortunately $2.99 is the lowest price I can set CI in the US under Amazon's 70% scheme. This means I don't sell so well there outside of promotions, despite all CI's awards being US based.

John Potter is the author of Chasing Innocence, a 3x award winning and bestselling Crime Thriller. UK US

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I Write (Finding time)

The second in a series discussing the method behind the madness. 

Walking across
 Hyde Park in March 2012

My weekday writing day is split into two halves. The first twelve hours span the moment I leave home at 07:30, to the moment I return at about 19:30. The morning commute into London takes one hour. The train I catch is an inter-city and usually has a buffet bar. I write with the netbook on the bar for the hour. This used to be a great time to write but more frequently now it isn't because more people know what I'm up-to. If the train isn't delayed into Paddington I'll walk the 2k into the office through Hyde Park. I'll be listening to Moby. His music plucks at my emotions, which transfers to the characters as I listen to them debate and react to different ideas and scenarios for the story. I call this process writing in my head. The point in this process I hear the character's voices, is the point I know I'm into the story.

I try not to write at lunchtime but if I'm hard into something then I probably will, or if I'm coming to the end of the book I will too. I do like to run lunchtimes around Hyde Park, which is an incredibly liberating process for this creative mind.

Of course I can often find myself frustrated at not being able to write during the day but will have moments that throw me into a scene or idea. Sometimes I'll be found stood in a corridor or waiting on a meeting, staring blankly into my imagination and writing in my head. Answering enquiring questions from colleagues with a 'just thinking through a problem.' Which may sound convincing as I'm paid to solve technical problems. As many colleagues have read the first book I suspect it isn't convincing any more.

Not waiting to get off
Waiting to leave Paddington.

On a good day I'll leave work at 17:30 and walk back to Paddington listening to Moby and writing in my head. As the trains out of Paddington are crowded to the point battery chickens travel in more comfort, I usually find myself a corner with a little shoulder space and read my Kindle. I love this reading time although I hate being a battery chicken for this hour.

If all goes well I'll be home for 19:30, listening to the Prid's (Mrs Potter) travails of the day while playing with the cat and cooking my dinner. By 21:00 the Prid will be winding down and the cat will be alternating between the two of us. By this time we're over fifteen hours into the day. I'm mentally exhausted and creativity seems like the last thing I want to do. My mind will do it's best to convince me anything but writing is the best course of action. The book isn't going to write itself though. So that there are minimal barriers to me sitting down and writing, my PC in the study is set-up so I can get a chapter on-screen in less than a minute.  I'll start editing the chapter I'm currently writing and before I know it I'm drawn into this wonderful world and away we go. I've never been much of a sleeper, not consistently. If I have the wind in my sails I might write through to one, if there's a gale blowing in my mind I've been known to write through three. If I was a full time writer I know I'd write through the night, like I did when I was a full-time programmer. Usually I stop sometime about midnight. The cat is often my companion, usually on my lap or on the desk, sometimes on the keyboard if she's not had enough attention. If the creative spark goes out or there's nothing in the tank I'll not force the issue, I'll turn my attention to a blog.

The worlds worst writing assistant.

I'm often asked: 'Where do you find the time to blog?' The reality is any post I write is the cumulative effort of thirty minutes, or an hour here and there. Sometimes over days or weeks. I'll have multiple posts on the go so when I drop out of creative, whatever's on my mind is what I work on. Blogging is important to me because not a lot of people are into what I'm into. Not at least people I spend any time with in any given day. Blogging allows me to chat away as if everyone is listening. Switching to blog mode is not difficult, it's not creative. I can be almost asleep and still be typing a blog. I collect my thoughts and express them in the fewest words possible. As such blogging is therapy.

Depending on what time I get to bed and the stage I'm in the book, the next morning's start will vary from five or six AM. If it's early in the book I'll wake up at six and lay in bed and daydream key markers in the story. If I'm on the long slope to the end I'll get up at five and write for two hours. This is usually editing and expanding what I wrote the day before. At seven all is synced and my focus becomes leaving for work at 7:30.

This is where it's mostly at

Occasionally nothing works like this at all. A good book will sometimes grab me like American Gods and The Hunger Games did recently. Sometimes I know where I need to get to in the story but can't think how. Or I've dreamed up a brilliant way to turn everything inside out and upside down, but for the life of me can't conjure a way to make it work. These moments are daunting because they're time consuming as I figure it all out, but they're also incredibly rewarding in knowing how it will play in the readers mind. I hope. Sometimes my brain is stuck on a blue screen and I'll crawl into bed to reboot.

Next in the series is Writing Method.
The first in the series was Interface

Crafty Bastards

It has been a long time since I bought a paperback or hardback book. I'm pretty sure I'm still buying at least as many books as I always have, probably more. As a regular commuter and someone that always has several books on the go, I'm grateful my rucksack isn't close to being as heavy as it was the last two decades. Likewise, holidays don't require checking-in a suitcase containing shorts, flip-flops, t-shirts and 28 kilos of books.

Don't get me wrong. I love the page to page physical interaction with paper books. Equally I don't find reading from a screen detrimental to the reading experience. Typically I'll read on the iPad when I'm indoors or commuting and on my Kindle device if I'm outside or on holiday - simply because the Kindle is smaller and the screen doesn't reflect light. My immersion in digital reading is all about practicalities.

As a writer and publisher of both paperback and digital books I have mixed feelings. There is absolutely nothing like holding a book you have written in your hands. It is a feeling I admit I don't get from holding a Kindle with my book on it. That's not to say it isn't a great feeling. Just nothing like holding the real thing. The trouble is I sell one hundred digital books for every one paperback. Selling digital books and how to price them has been the subject of much conversation in the press and within the publishing industry. Both among commercial and independent publishers like me. The commercial publishing industry seems desperate to retain the pricing paper based books give them, or at least to find some leverage to make money in the digital age.

Anyone that has spent just a little time reading what I write here, will know I hold Lee Child in very high regard. I'm thankfully now over my 'I want to write like Lee Child' phase - I realised I needed to write like me. Lee Child is one of the most successful commercial authors at this time. His next Reacher book - A Wanted Man, is scheduled for release Aug 30 and is currently (June) in the Amazon top #100 book charts. That's not just in fiction, that's across all book genres including non-fiction.

Every year I pre-order the next Reacher book, usually when it appears on Amazon. The last time I bought a Reacher novel anywhere other than Amazon was about 2007. Before I wrote this post I was looking at the Amazon page for A Wanted Man, and like I did in my post on Kindle pricing, I pondered the £10 price-tag for the Kindle edition. It's only £1.50 cheaper than the hardback. The pricing is unusually high even from a commercial publisher with a popular author. While deliberating the high Kindle price I got to thinking how much I used to love looking at my collection of Reacher hardbacks on my bookshelf. About thirty seconds after that I got to thinking I might as well buy the hardback as I'll read it so quickly it's bulk won't be much of an issue. I'll also be able to swing around in my chair and admire the hardback on the shelf, sometimes maybe even pull it out and flick through the pages - as I'm prone to do if I'm searching for inspiration. I'd probably get the Kindle edition anyway for reference and portability when the pricing comes down to paperback levels. Then I got to thinking how clever that was - that I'd pay top dollar for the hardback and then pay again for the convenience of Kindle. Crafty bastards, I thought.

Is it all worthwhile?

As an indie author I am the driving force behind every aspect of my book, from creativity to design and publication through marketing. It’s a lot of hard work. One might argue it’s a futile pursuit, this writing dream. So why do it? Where are the moments that make it all worthwhile?

• For me, finishing the writing of my first book was a triumph regardless of any eventual destination.
• Working with a copy and proof editor to build a consistent grammatical and storied narrative was a revelation.
• Bringing an image from my imagination to a book cover was a collaborative process I will forever treasure.
• Holding the printed book in my hands was the culmination of three years sweat and tears. It was joyous.
• Likewise seeing the book on Amazon and available to buy left me dizzy with hope.
• Whether sold for free, cents or dollars, seeing the downloads mount up was another layer of hope.
• Seeing it consistently sell is vindication against the demons inside of me, who would have me believe story was more important than overall quality.

For all the highs none have come close to the utter elation of knowing someone read my book, stayed up half the night to finish it and then immediately sat down to write a review for the most thrilling book they ever read.

So thank you linnyvinny and Rachel, and David, and Ella, and shopper2010, and Jimmy. And all the reviewers who have taken the time to say something about Chasing Innocence.

Above all, a writer wants the words they weave to be read. Knowing people are reading what you write is one thing, knowing they enjoyed it in all the ways you hoped they would, really does make it all worthwhile.

Nine Days in February (An alternative approach to marketing)

On January 17 the Kindle version of Chasing Innocence became available on Amazon. 21 days later it had sold 21 copies and I knew each and every one of the people that had bought it. I was one of them. My search for an audience led me to Twitter, where I found a lot of indie authors. None of course were particularly interested in my book, because like me, they were looking for an audience for theirs. One author did lead me to the Kindle Book Review, resulting in my first 5 star review and my first interview. This same author was marketing the hell out of her book with great success. The author was also a successful businesswoman. In describing her book's success she detailed the need to create a platform. Hers was the Twitter community.

As much as I admired her drive and was a little envious of her success, I knew pretty quickly her platform wasn't mine. For a start, I just don't have the time between a wife, full-time job and writing the next book, to build a second career in marketing. The reality, even if I did have time, is I don't have the marketing brass balls, or desire, to do it. Commercial marketing is part of a world I'm trying to escape from. It probably sounds awfully naive to ignore the power of digital marketing, especially from someone that has spent their entire career neck deep in the digital industry. But it's my experiences over the last two decades especially, that drives me to sidestep viral marketing campaigns, and to offer instead a friendly smile and a great book.

Of course, I still need a platform to get going. In this case I need people to start reading my book and talking about it. To this end I signed up to the Amazon Select program. Among many other things Select will offer your book for free. Amazon will then tell Kindle owners who like your kind of book, that it's there to be downloaded. I set my promotion to start 8 Feb and to run for two days. I had no idea what to expect at all. Having sold 21 copies of Chasing Innocence to friends and family, I hoped some people would download it and eventually read it.

36 hours into the promotion Chasing Innocence had gone from unranked to #2 in the overall free UK Kindle charts, and #30 in the US. A position it maintained right to the end of the promotion. Over 48 hours Chasing Innocence averaged a download every 45 seconds. It's success within a crowded marketplace of free books, was testament to the quality of the cover art, product description and Sarah Burns' excellent 5 star review, given on behalf of the Kindle Book Review.

There was more to come. Chasing Innocence hit the paid charts. By Sunday the 12 Feb it had reached #71 in the UK Kindle store and was #21 in thriller fiction. Nine days after offering Chasing Innocence for free it had been downloaded 4,400 times. And I can't say I wasn't caught up in the whole chart thing. The reality was, apart from a great cover and a handful of 5-Star reviews on Amazon, there was nothing to keep it in the charts. It had built momentum though. Word of mouth, some dedicated friends, the increasing number of Amazon reviews and the mechanics of Amazon's website, mean Chasing Innocence continues to sell at a steady volume. Something I could only have dreamed of nine days ago. That volume wasn't enough to keep it in the charts though. I could have dropped the price and started marketing. It was real tempting. I didn't for all the reasons I have explained.

My hope is that a portion of the people that download Chasing Innocence, will read it. I know it won't be for everyone because twelve people have gone to the trouble of returning it. It is after-all everything it says on the cover. The chances are, if the reader is gripped by the prologue, they'll turn the last page of the Epilogue about two days later. They might then tell someone just how good it was. And maybe even write an Amazon review. Then, in a year or so, I might be able to tell you how great books and a smile did make for good marketing after all.

Going Kindle for less than the price of a tasty sandwich

I am, it has to be said, a huge fan of ebooks. I bought a Sony e-reader two years ago and owned a Kindle the minute they were released in the UK. I now exclusively read Kindle books because of the convenience. In the main the books are also cheaper. That said, having gone to the trouble of writing and actually printing a book, there is something quite satisfying about holding in your hands tangible evidence for all that toil. Especially when the book looks THIS good. The reality is, while electricity is available to power portable devices, the future role of printed books will gradually evolve away from what it is now. The lesson I learned on this debut publishing experience was a printed book takes a lot of time to produce, and almost as long to filter though wholesalers and distributor databases. In future I'll be making the Kindle version available while the printing mechanics clunk through and not afterwards. Compared to printing a book, publishing for a Kindle was almost a breeze.

I did consider using the free e-book management tool - Calibre. It does a damn fine job of making your book Kindle ready and with a little learning you can get very close to a professional finish.  I didn't consider for one minute uploading the HTML or Word book file directly to Amazon and letting them do everything else, as that would have left the book very much in the hands of automation. I could have hired someone to create the Kindle edition, but it's not that difficult if you've ever done a bit of web design. I did it myself so that I'd have total control over layout. My mantra throughout has been to produce a product at least AS GOOD as those available from 'proper' publishers. To this end my baseline for laying out both book versions was Lee Child's - The Affair.

Both digital and printed versions began with my completed draft of the book. Chasing Innocence was written in OpenOffice and then exported to Word for copy and proof editing. Once that was done it was imported to QuarkExpress for typesetting, for the per page layout of the printed book. Then it was exported to a PDF document format and sent to the printers. For the digital versions, QuarkExpress doesn't have a 'save as Kindle' or 'save as epub' option, so the book was exported as Word. And from Word I exported as 'filtered html' - which removes a lot of the Word specific 'junk code' and leaves you with a relatively un-cluttered html file. HTML is a text file, formatted so you can see content in a web browser. It is also the basis for the content of digital books. The Kindle especially wants uncluttered HTML with little formatting. This is because the Kindle expects to handle much of the text layout or digital typesetting itself, including the font style, the font size and line spacing at the readers choice. I decided on three simple paragraph styles. The first forced the Kindle NOT to indent the first line of each chapter or section. If you take a look at the first paragraph of any chapter of any printed book, you will see why. Without this formatting the Kindle will indent the first line of every paragraph. The second style tells the Kindle what size of indent must be applied to all other paragraphs. No other styling was specified because the Kindle supports very little. If you try to get fancy, what looks pretty in a web browser will probably be ignored or worse, confuse the device. The third was for styling chapter headings. I kept this simple too, trying to reproduce the look of the printed book with centred text and each new chapter starting several centimetres down the page, using the top and bottom margin tags. These three styles made the content of the HTML file nice and easy. I also used the top and bottom margin tags to create ad-hoc spacing in the non-chapter pages at the front and back. Then I manually added in page-breaks at every required section, as letting the Kindle decide had some unexpected results.

The Kindle has a menu option, from which you can select 'GoTo...' From here you can select the beginning, the cover, table of contents and the end.  The device works out the end for itself. For the Table of Contents to work you must name each section in the book using standard HTML 'A' tags. As I had ninety-five chapters and several other distinctive sections, I named the sections and used Calibre to generate the table of contents from a copy. I then pasted that into the beginning of my HTML book file. To make sure the Kindle GoTo menu option works the cover needs to have a name tag of: 'cover', the table of contents: 'TOC and the Title Page: 'Start'. Creating the cover itself was a matter of cropping the book's cover to fit the Kindle screen (600 x 800) and linking the image into the HTML file, and giving it that 'cover' name tag. For the Beginning option you make sure the title page is named 'Start' and you're almost good to go.

Apart from the main HTML body of your book and the cover image file, you need two other files for a fully packaged Kindle book. The first is used by the Kindle to navigate backwards and forwards between chapters in the book. Your bundled book won't be accepted by Amazon without one. Once more I used Calbre to create the 'toc.ncx' and then edited it to my needs.

The next file is almost the final stage. The contents file (OPF) is used to compile your book. I used MobiPocket Creator to do this as it was free and recommended by Amazon, editing the contents it generated to match Amazon guidelines for embedding the cover and pointing to the toc.ncx created previously. I then used it to compile the book. Now this is where it gets interesting. You want to check your book looks good on a Kindle right? While you can download the Kindle previewer for your PC/MAC, it doesn't exactly match how your book will look on a Kindle. If you actually own a Kindle you may know it has its own email address which you can find in its settings pages. If you email your compiled book as an attachment to this address, from the email account you log into Amazon with, it will appear on your Kindle. Usually within five-ten minutes.

By doing this and reviewing on the Kindle, I noticed and changed some formatting, and decided it would look more professional with some logos on the title, copyright and final page. So I added these at the correct locations like I did for the cover and after a few revisions we were good to go. A few days later after the final check-through, I logged into Amazon, specified a separate cover image for the Amazon page, linked it to the printed books ISBN and clicked go. As I own worldwide rights I had to specify a price for each region, instead opting to let the books pricing be based on the US dollar value. This works out at £3:49, which was my initial target price. I will of course monitor and amend the price. Amazon then took the file and processed it, allowing me to download the exact file of Chasing Innocence they will send to your Kindle when you ever so kindly buy it. After I tested it was good, I clicked Finished and after a request to prove I was the author, copyright and world wide rights holder, the book suddenly and quite majestically, appeared on Amazon.

Now all you need to do is click on this link to go to the Kindle version of Chasing Innocence, where you will be one more click from seeing what I've been banging on about these last few months, and importantly, you will be mere seconds from being the proud owner of an enthralling, thriller fiction digital novel that cost you less than a tasty sandwich.