My Writing Is So Bad That It Makes People Uncomfortable

I have commented before on the reviews I receive of my books. The reviews are largely bad. Sometimes this is because I produce books that people do not want. Apparently my counter-factual history books cannot be in the alternate history section because I do not make firm enough decisions on what might have happened. My books of analysis are criticised for not being books of stories and ironically my books of stories are criticised for presenting the world as it might have been. Despite having 'Factual' and 'Counterfactual' sections in my books I apparently do not make the distinction clearly enough. My syntax is bad because my sentences are too long and also too fragmented. My books are 'BORING' as well.

Apparently despite my research, my portrayal of certain historical characters is seen as being speculative. I am apparently wrong to feel a victory for the Confederacy in the American Civil War or a US victory in Vietnam would be bad outcomes for the USA, though given the words of Donald Trump currently receiving such support I realise that I come from a very different planet to many Americans so it is inevitable that my views are different. A book featuring stories set in Britain is condemned because it is just about Britain. A story featuring the Mongols is apparently insufficiently pro-Mongol to have any credibility.

Some feel '[t]he concept is really clever. Unfortunately the writing is far from gripping.', possibly because not every story involves a huge battle. Even those who feel my books are 'interesting' will not give me better than the mediocre 3-star rating. Positive reviews present me as writing obscure stuff far away from the work of Harry Turtledove, though my books are pretty much like many of his collections, perhaps again I simply have insufficient fighting.

Nothing I do in my books, how I re-edit them or re-categorise them is enough to satisfy the majority of people who commentate on my books. I cannot find the right category for some people. I cannot write in the precise way certain readers want, though I spell check and grammar check repeatedly and revise again and again. I cannot write in American English though I have tried. I cannot turn myself into a Trump supporter and I know that there are enough books out there on Amazon in that style that fans of his have no need to come anywhere near my books. I cannot afford to use the copyrighted images that some people insist upon.

These are problems I have faced with my writing. The strength of feeling often surprises me; commentators take real offence at what I have dared to do. The attacks from so many sides make me want to abandon writing, which I know is the objective of many critics. Today's posting, however, is to indicate how much power I clearly have over people that I somehow 'lure' into reading my books. One has said that 'Even though I knew what I was buying, it just was not an enjoyable experience.' which makes my book sound like it is heroin and at least an enema. Indeed one commentator has said he found my book '[a]lmost painful'. As a writer I must be something like a venus flytrap. I am able to lure people in to buy my book and read it; not to return it for a refund as they can easily do, and yet write so badly that I make them really suffer to the extent that they cannot simply stop reading my book, but they have to utterly delete it from their e-reader.

I clearly have a weapon that maybe the British or perhaps the US government might want to pick up on. With training and practice it seems likely that I can write a book which is both so intriguing at yet so bad that it will kill someone. I know it is said that 'the pen is mightier than the sword' but had not realised how literal that the saying was. So far I guess I have produced books like a razor blade and with time I may work up to a stiletto and then a proper dagger.

Readers of Alternate History Books Living in a Different World

As people who have visited this blog before will know, I am a keen writer. I have over thirty e-books up for sale on Amazon. Most fall into two categories. One is detective stories set in 1920s Germany and the other are two sorts of alternate history books - some are stories and some are essays. I have much greater problem with the latter than the former. I do keep running into Americans who believe my syntax is wrong. I keep checking and checking, running every device and pair of eyes I can use over the work and cannot see what they are referring to; Word certainly does not agree with them and it is a stickler even for the correct use of 'which' and 'that' and likes to see no implied verbs or nouns, something it seems does not occur in American compared to British.

I used to write collections of essays about various what if? scenarios from different periods of history, This was something I had done initially on this blog and then turned into books. However, many people did not seem to understand that they were not stories and so would buy them and then complain when they got something different. It only takes one 1-star or 2-star review on Amazon to end your sales of a book and so many of mine whilst still available sell nothing. It used to be that you could take down a book, revise it and put it back up again without the old reviews remaining. Amazon have removed that ability and so you end up in the difficult situation that reviews will often be attached to a book referring to content which is no longer in it because it was removed during revision. Like eBay, Amazon is all about the buyer and the seller is simply taken for granted, they lack the ability to respond to what is said, however erroneous.

One reviewer complained that there were no maps and no photographs. I am experimenting on getting maps into my e-books but trying to get them of sufficient quality and clarity is a challenge. As for photos or even computer-drawn maps, the main challenge is the copyright charges would quickly exceed any money I would make on the books, let alone barring me with any profit. I would love to have photographs but until someone can find me a copyright-free source of numerous famous historical figures then that will be impossible without me losing money.

I have had readers demanding that I include ratings of how feasible a particular outcome would have been. Though, of course, that is an opinion of every reader and would make little sense. I never want to patronise my readers and maybe that is my problem. These days readers expect every last item pointed out explicitly to them and every loose end tied up. It is incredibly difficult to have a trilogy with an ongoing plot accepted, people want everything resolved by the end of a single book. One reviewer insisted that I was not firm enough in my conclusions and that I should say explicitly what outcome I believed would occur. He argued that because my conclusions left too many options open, my books should be removed from the Alternate History category on Amazon, but it was not clear where he expected them to go instead. As usual, it seems he simply wanted me to remove my books from sale. I was once surprised how angry my books made people but no longer. I do lack the arrogance to simply say that something would have happened. That is not really the work of an essayist about alternate history as the veracity of any outcome can never be known. It is the realm of the novelist and short story writer, which is why I may be having less problem since abandoning the essay books in favour of more clearly works of fiction.

A review posted today about one of my alternate history books of essays, 'In Another America: Views and Reviews of Alternate Histories for the USA in the 17th-20th Centuries' drew my attention to something which I had missed and alerted me to the fact that I should recognise how alien some of my potential readership is. The reviewer criticised the book for being 'sanctimonious'. He also felt it was wrong of me to judge the real outcomes of the American Civil War and the Vietnam War as the correct ones. I have known for a while that many of the alternate history books available on Amazon are written by extreme Republicans from the USA. As a commentator on the review pointed out, this led Richard J. Evans to publish 'Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History' (2014) which according to 'The Guardian' review: 'Evans's rigorous demolition of what-if? narratives decries counterfactual history as a fundamentally reactionary pursuit'. Of course, I disagree and saw no point in reading this book. However, with the kind of input I am getting from readers of my books, I am beginning to feel that even if not all the writers are strongly right-wing, the majority of readers are.

In addition to criticisms about my views on the American Civil War and the Vietnam War, there was criticism that a story set in 13th century France was told from the perspective of the French people and not that of the Mongols. On this basis, the book was condemned as 'a primary school exercise'. The assumption is that real men would write from the perspective of raiders who slaughtered thousands and destroyed much of cultural importance not only in Europe but huge swathes of Europe. Only a child would seek to explore the reaction of Christian Europeans to that assault, even though their culture is one from which ours (yes, and that includes you Americans) has evolved. Only now do I see that these Republicans have no investment in the society in which they live; they have no interest in democracies or freedoms and would rather live in a barbaric society in which the determining factor is how brutally you can murder people and how effectively you can destroy buildings, art and literature. Unfortunately this seems to be a large part of the readers attracted to my books. It is not surprising that they are disappointed.

Returning to the latest review, I had to remind myself that for Americans, 'liberal' equates to left-wing rather than centrist. I was criticised for seeing social welfare as beneficial, the reviewer said disparagingly: 'He thinks that progressive social programs are good.' I think I would be pushed to find anyone who though they were bad, but again, I am not living in the USA where I know they attacked ideas around public health care as being akin to the extermination policies of Stalin and Hitler. Maybe I am wrong. Write in and tell me if you think there should be no social benefits for anyone and that the National Health Service is doing bad to the UK.

The reviewer goes on: 'He presents many debatable points and simply assumes that any informed reader will agree. He does this a lot when the question is regarding questions of the desirability of specific historic outcomes - for example, a confederate victory in the Civil War, or US victory in Vietnam.' My simple answer to this is - yes I do make that assumption. If you are intelligent enough to read my books, then surely you must accept that slavery was a bad thing and was not benefiting the USA at all and that the South has benefited immensely from being part of the broad Union. Convince me that Texas and Florida would be as wealthy now if they were part of the CSA. It was at that moment that I realised that it was like I was dealing with people from a different planet.

Despite living in one of the largest and longest enduring democracies in the world; a multi-cultural state that offered refuge to persecuted people from across the world, these people feel that that is all wrong. Instead, they feel that no-one should assume that that is the correct model, and in fact, that slavery and harsh racial division could somehow have been a better option. I presume the reviewer is a white man. I imagine he would get a very different perspective if he spoke to a black or Hispanic neighbour or someone whose ancestors fled from Nazism in Europe or simply spoke to a woman. Remember the Confederacy was hardly advanced on women's rights either. I thought there might be some Americans who still supported slavery, but I imagined they were unlikely to be buying books or reading. What is shocking is the overlap between those two categories of people in a modern democracy.

Now, one can certainly debate the desirability of a US victory in Vietnam rather than the withdrawal in 1973. By that stage US troops had been in the country for eight years without being able to defeat either North Vietnam nor the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. I have heard of the futility of the effort from a man who was there. The war also had immense impact on neighbouring Laos and Cambodia leading to decades of slaughter and hardship. If you go to Vietnam the impact is enduring in the number of US landmines across the country and the number of mutated children as a result of US chemical warfare, even forty years on. The USA did not leave Vietnam as a result of pressure from any other country. Withdrawal occurred under a Republican President, Richard Nixon who had great cold warrior credentials. The defeat has traumatised the USA and maybe I under-estimated the fact that even since the end of the Cold War and Vietnam becoming a popular tourist destination for Americans, it cuts so hard that they lost the conflict. However, let us reflect on how much worse it would have been if the USA had won in Vietnam. Of course, in this judgement the Vietnamese will not enter the equation as they never do in American judgements of the success or failure of the war.

My life has been made easy by a commentator on Amazon who has pointed to the US victories in the Gulf War of 1990-91, the Iraq War of 2003-11 and in Afghanistan, 2001-11, though effectively ongoing as is the conflict now back in Iraq. In all of these cases the USA won the war and yet that meant years of commitment in terms of troops and resources, it also meant ongoing deaths and maiming for many US service personnel. If the USA had won in Vietnam in 1972 would the US public have tolerated troops still being there in 1980? How many more Americans would have been killed or mutilated? How many more young men would have left the USA to escape the draft, taking their input into the economy with them? How much racial tension would have been stoked up by African-Americans feeling they were fighting the war on behalf of the WASPs? How much money would have been drained from the US economy? How bad would the USA's relations with the rest of NATO have been? How hostile would China have remained to the USA? How authoritarian would the government have had to become to suppress the growing anti-war protests? How long would Thailand have put up with Vietnamese refugees? How soon would it have been before a madman like Pol Pot in Cambodia have begun to introduce genocide in Vietnam? You can lie about these things and pretend that a US victory would have created a peaceful prosperous country by 1973 with minimal input in terms of soldiers or dollars. However, you only have to look at the bitter, protracted involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan after what were declared victories, to see that a win in Vietnam for the USA would have had far worse consequences than the defeat.

What I have come to realise is that I am living on a different planet to some readers and certainly my reviewers. There society is straining because it is compelled to live in democracy, with civil liberties and opportunities. Over here, and I know President Obama and many millions of Americans are on this side of the portal, we think democracy is a good thing and we work hard to maintain it. We look at the history with interest and will often speculate about why it turned out a particular way and if any alternatives were feasible. However, over here we like our safety, our freedoms and our tolerance and have no desire to visit a world where Mongols slaughtering and destroying are seen as the correct models for how we should live.

Writer's Blues: Now the Bank Will Not Accept My Royalty Cheques

One reason for the neglect of this blog has been the fact that I have been busy writing 'what if?' history books in an effort to spread the word about this aspect of history but also to make some money.  Back in September 2012 when I first started doing this, I noted that whilst it was easy to receive royalties from Amazon for books you sold in most countries, for those sold in the USA it was a lot harder: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/kindling-some-e-books.html  The US government takes 30% of any royalties earned in the USA unless you are a US tax payer.  Unlike with sales in other countries, Amazon makes it harder still, by having a threshold of US$100 before it will pay the royalties.  For other countries, until late last year there was a threshold of around €10 before they made a payment, which meant that for some countries months and months could go by before you received the small crumbs of cash.  That limit has been taken off and you get paid whatever you have earned, even if it is equivalent to 30p.

Once I topped the US$100 mark a cheque (or 'check' as the Americans call it) was sent to me in US$, though in fact it just said 'dollars' and nothing bar Amazon's address showed that it was US$ and not Canadian, Australian or Hong Kong dollars instead.  I then had to take this to my bank, pay a £6 fee and wait six weeks while it was 'negotiated'.  By the end of the process I was lucky if I got 65% of what I had originally earned in the USA and am still liable to further tax unless I register as a US as well as a UK taxpayer.  This was very frustrating given that the USA has always been my largest market.  The situation has now got worse.  My bank, the Nationwide Building Society has started refusing cheques below US$250 and indeed returned one I had submitted to them last month and I believed was being processed.  I have contacted Amazon to see if they will hold on to my US payments until they exceed US$250 after the royalty deduction, but knowing them, they will simply ignore this and plough on saying their way is the only acceptable one.  This leaves me accumulating cheques with which I can do nothing so the 70% remaining from my sales will now go to Amazon.  It seems incredible that Amazon sticks to one way of paying these royalties and a non-electronic way which is quickly fading from usage certainly in the UK.  This week I wrote the first cheque I had written since January 2013.

I am at a loss what to do.  Cheques expire after six months and I am left trying to find a bank which can cash these cheques.  It seems ridiculous that I have to open an account at a different back just to get to my money.  There is never any point in asking Amazon to do anything and as I have noted before, despite their global reach their focus is simply on US writers with the rest of us largely being inconvenient and stupid in not understanding the 'proper way' these things should be done.  However, the many thousands of us are now earning Amazon a lot more money that we were doing before, simply because they stubbornly adhere to their self-made rules, but I guess that is the way they like it.

P.P. 01/03/2014
Surprisingly Amazon responded to my query and told me how I could alter the cheque payment to an electronic payment so money from US sales now comes the same way as for the other countries.  Why this is not the default as it is for all the other countries, I have no idea.  However, fortunately it has resolved my difficulty.  I did find that HSBC will take foreign cheques of less than US$250 so paid the outstanding cheque into an old account I had there, fortunately.  They charge £6 per transaction just like Nationwide.

Fight Back Against Trolls – Become a Goat

I recognise that almost inadvertently, since I was encouraged into writing e-books, this blog has mutated into being a bit of a writer’s blog.  Rather naively, I thought producing e-books would not be easy, but certainly did not anticipate having them stamped on by people whose hobby is simply dismissing books.  Clearly I should have read more of the writers’ discussion boards on Amazon before embarking on involving myself in the self-publishing e-book world.

It was not as if I did not know about ‘trolls’, i.e. people who go around the internet usually anonymously making offensive remarks about anyone they choose.  Quite often these are well-known people.  Recently I have read some of the horrific stuff sent to Classical historian, Professor Mary Beard, OBE and the pro-rape ‘communities’ that FaceBook refuses to remove though it does take down pictures of a woman breastfeeding her child.  Ordinary people also suffer trolling and often lack the range of supporters to fight back.  It is a form of bullying that clearly allows some people to get a buzz about pushing down others.  It is clear that there a individuals who subscribe to an unacceptable view of what society should be, largely violent, racist and anti-women, to shout out their views wherever they chose.  Their view of society is so distorted that they get angry at people who seek to instil any sense of humanity into the debate.  The ground is fertile, when publications like ‘The Guardian’ and even specialist journals like the ‘Times Higher Education’, as one regular reader of this blog pointed out, have discussions in which commentators just attack the abilities and knowledge of each other in offensive terms, you almost appear to be half-way to the really outrageous stuff from the outset.

In some, perhaps many, cases trolling appears to stem from a sense of inadequacy.  As the person cannot run an interesting blog or write a novel, they feel no-one else should be allowed to enjoy the success of doing so.  In many cases, like the specific one I discuss below, they seek to assert their superiority by being a better ‘train spotter’ than others and insisting that their spotting of minutiae is important.  In the past such people were confined to their clubs of like-minded people.  At worst you would encounter them like the Harry Enfield character telling you ‘you don’t want to be doing that’.  They were tiresome but avoidable.  On the internet they are less easily avoidable and when ratings and sales are important and these days are not allowed to be independent of ‘feedback’ they have a destructive edge.  It is the revenge of the geek, they now hold the power online and they are not satisfied even with smearing your reputation, they want you to suffer and to be seen to suffer.  It is like a drug that they have to keep coming back to.

In this posting, I am not going to take on the whole trolling community, but am going to focus on those who impinge most on what I do.  As a blogger I have been very fortunate that I have not received the kind of attacks so many do, especially women blogging.  Running the blog we have the control to delete comments that offend us and can respond immediately.  Such facility tends to be lacking when you move on to selling e-books, in my case, via Amazon.  I have commented on previous postings about the negative comments I have received so will not revisit those.  I have removed almost all the alternate history books which attracted this attention.  However, looking around other writers’ books I have seen a common pattern.  The one that was sent to me by the regular was ‘The Nanking War’ (2009) by Ryan McCall.  This book has been available as a paperback and now as an e-book on Amazon.com the generic and US version of the company.  The book considers a war breaking out between the USA and Japan over the Rape of Nanking [Nanjing] in 1937.  As readers know, I like alternate history fiction and essays, so this attracted my attention, especially as it neither started from ‘what if Hitler had won the Second World War?’ nor ‘what if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War?’ the basis nowadays of a large number of books.

The review on Amazon.com gave it a 1-star.  What was interesting was that the structure of the review was almost identical to one I had received for ‘His Majesty’s Dictator’.  This is unsurprising given that these troll-reviewers are pretty small in number and unimaginative.  It started by saying the ‘I found Mr. McCall's writing to be technically correct and the story is well edited.’  They usually put in a positive, though editing, something the trolls can wheedle out small errors from is often a target.  The reviewer then complains that the story fails because even though it is alternate history ‘that history must be grounded in some sort of reality for the reader to suspend disbelief.’  Fine.  Now, personally I would challenge this book on the fact that the USA did very little in response to the Rape of Nanjing and in fact did very little in response to the sinking of the USS ‘Patay’ by the Japanese or their invasion of central China.  Even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than four years later, it was not clear that the USA would enter the war.

What grounds does the troll-reviewer condemn this book?  I quote:

‘Mr. McCall chooses 1937 as the time frame for his story therefore he needs to ground the reality of his story to that year. For example, McCall arms the U.S. Marines in Nanking War with magazine-fed Winchester rifles. In 1937, U.S. Marines assigned to China were issued Springfield 1903, bolt action rifles. McCall's lack of understanding of military rank structure also hurts the story. He claims the Marine Lieutenant was a squad leader. Marine Lieutenants were and are platoon leaders not squad leaders.’

It is on this basis that the reviewer gives the book 1-star.  This means it will not be recommended to people searching for alternate history and given that sales end once you have a 2-star review, he might as well take the book off sale.  As my correspondent highlights, these minor details would be overlooked by most readers anyway.  In addition, given that it is alternate history, what is to say that the USA would not have issued different rifles?  The US Marines in China were a garrison force not one going to war.  In addition, many officers who have gone into combat have ended up taking different roles as a result of local circumstances.  A further point is, if the reviewer felt these small issues utterly undermined the book, then s/he could have written to the author.  You can amend and republish a book written in English in under 12 hours on Amazon, sometimes far quicker than this.

Of course, the objective of the reviewer is not to alert readers to minor errors or show that the book is no good.  Ironically these trolls often laud the good aspects of a book and then make judgements on minor points as if any spelling or grammar mistake or any technical detail which does not fit their memory is enough to damn an entire book.  On this basis, Ian Fleming’s James Bond series with their erroneous technical details about guns and geographical locations should not be in print.  The same goes for work by Henning Mankel and Philip Kerr.  Even Robert Conroy and Harry Turtledove that the reviewer recommends instead, have made such minor ‘mistakes’ in their work.  There is no capacity for the author to diverge from what is perceived to be the ‘truth’ despite writing fiction.  It goes for genres as a whole too.  I had ‘His Majesty’s Dictator’ rated 1-star not for the quality of the book, but simply because the troll-reviewer felt that there was no demand for a 1940s pastiche.  He had made a judgement for the entire reading population about what they might like to read and sought to censor a whole genre.

I accept that books may be poorly written and this should be highlighted to readers.  However, the utter condemnation of a novel simply because of minor, easily altered aspects or the type of novel it happens to be, is unproductive.  It utterly crushes innovation.  Authors of the 1960s and 1970s could not have moved on contemporary writing if they had been open to the kind of attacks writers of nowadays face.  It seems that there are particular approaches, with nerdy attention to passing details that are the only acceptable books.  I guess this is why there are no many novels dealing with Islamist terrorist attacks as these appeal to the mindset of the trolls.

I wondered if there was a way to deal with troll-reviewers.  I have no desire to write the kind of books they insist upon and yet do want to get my work out there.  Ultimately, I think once I have got my career back on track, assuming that ever happens and I do not slide even further, then I will make my work free once more.  For now, however, I welcome the little bits of income and what they can buy for me and the ones I love.  ‘The Guardian’ provided some anti-troll guidance: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/12/how-to-deal-with-trolls

However, what was suggested to me was that more of us need to become ‘goats’.  The term might not be an attractive one, but apparently comes from the fairy tale, ‘The Billy Goats Gruff’ about a trio of goats who trick and then butt off a troll that lives under a bridge they have to cross.  You have to have a strong stomach as I guess the trolls will turn on you if you goat.  I have seen people who have challenged such reviews patronised as naïve and ignorant.  However, you have to believe that you are right and remember that some poor author has spent months, perhaps years, writing a piece of work.  While some writers may need to enhance their skills, no-one intentionally puts up a shoddy, rushed book.  However, all of this effort can be destroyed by someone bored for ten minutes or less, over their lunch break, who wants to boost their own ego by kicking someone else.

Yes, if the book is bad, then a critical review is fine.  However, it needs to be constructive and not simply bury a book because it does not cover some niggly detail or is a different kind of book to what the reviewer wants.  I have heard that writers of gay fiction get this all the time.  Despite labelling it as ‘gay fiction’ which you can do on Amazon and having covers which suggest the content, they get virulent complaints from male readers who feel they have been ‘tricked into reading this filth’.

Challenge reviewers. It seems easier for people in general to comment on reviews on Amazon than it is for the writer to respond to them.  If the book has some minor errors, then it probably deserves a 3- or a 4-star rating, not to be condemned forever on the basis of these.  Challenge reviewers who argue that no-one will want that genre.  That is not a question of quality, that is a question of consumer choice.  If it gets a 1-star, then of course, no-one will go near it.  However, a writer can quickly tell which genres do not sell, they need no reviewer to tell them that.  Challenge reviewers who make patronising judgements especially on the age, gender or nationality of the writer.  A lot of great fiction would not have come about if writers had faced these prejudices so extensively in the past century.  There was prejudice, but there is no place for it now.  The internet is supposed to be free to speak and express ideas and self-publishing is an element of that now.  However, if trolls are free to shut down innovation and a range of authors, we are effectively seeing amateur censorship, intolerable in large parts of the world.

I am going to be using my own goats in an attempt to get back at troll-reviewers.  Thus, I would encourage you to get out there goating for other writers, starting with poor Ryan McCall if you can spot no-one else just yet.  Be proud, be a goat!

My Delusions Of Being An Author

With 2013 the bad reviews of my e-books have turned from a trickle, if not to a flood, then a regular river.  I never would have expected that I would have been so savaged for my views on Finland.  I am taken to task for portraying it as an ally rather than simply a co-belligerent of Nazi Germany.  Furthermore apparently my counter-factual analysis is poorly researched and superficial.  I am naive in that I focus on single elements of change and apparently fail to grasp every logistical and political element of the implications, only mentioning some of them.  I never start with foregone conclusions, but rather through testing the ideas come to conclusion of whether the alternative was feasible and the extent of implications from it.  This is clearly an unacceptable approach.

Ironically I worried that my ideas were too sweeping.  However, clearly the style of Peter Tsouras whose writing encompasses every movement of every military unit on a day is what people want to read. I set out to write essay collections that stimulated debate.  I did not aim in 2-5,000 words to cover absolutely every aspect of a 'what if?' and so I am attacked as being incompetent and superficial.  Others feel that I put in too much actual history and looked at too many potential outcomes.  Overall there is no acceptance for the type of book that I have been producing and selling for the past year.  There is no point in setting myself up to be dismissed as foolish and sloppy.  Clearly there are loads of other writers out there who are far better than me and so I am poor in comparison.

Yes, I have made mistakes.  I have portrayed Finland in the 1940s in a way which is apparently unacceptable.  My defence of my view of its government is apparently too weak to be acceptable.  I mistyped 'John' when I meant to write 'James' Buchanan, the US president.  I also managed to mix up Rhode Island which is the size of London with Michigan which is comparable in size with the size of the UK.  My spellchecker changed 'regent' to 'region' and I failed to stop it.  Of course, in this world of the single reader as all-powerful, these errors, corrected in a matter of seconds, mark my books out as unacceptable forever more.  I cannot afford and editor.  I know no-one with sufficient knowledge to edit the books that I write covering so many countries and time periods.  Errors slip through even with leading authors, I have noted errors in books by Philip Kerr, Henning Mankel and for Jonathan Franzen the entirely wrong version of his book 'Freedom' was published.  These days, make a slip-up and that is your book condemned without chance of redemption.  I have been told that there are so many errors in my books that people have not got time to list them all.  This shows that I clearly know so little about history despite researching it and teaching it for the past twenty years, that I can never hope to write an 'accurate' book.

I used to think that I wrote English well.  I do have a tendency to write over-involved sentences with too many sub-clauses.  To some readers it is difficult to penetrate such writing.  At the same time Britons and Americans see my text as too fragmented.  Despite all my reading and re-reading and editing, apparently I end up with incomplete sentences and too much repetition of words.  I clearly lack the ability to step far enough back from my writing to see this, that is even though I spend far more time editing than I do writing.  I made a mistake in trying a 'chatty' style for my books.  Clearly what customers insist on is a very serious style with short sentences that are complete.  Though I have tried to do this I have clearly failed.  Readers find my style so offensive that they simply have to write about it in detail.  Apparently every page of my books are filled with grammatical errors, no matter how much I run the grammar checker over my text.

I have clearly been deluded from comments on this blog and from sales of my books over the past eight months that I could be an author of counter-factual books.  I thought I had found a style which was appropriate for e-books, engaging people in historical debate without drowning them in details.  However, it is clear that I was wrong in this.  My books clearly frustrate and upset people to such an extent that they have to take them to pieces and portray me as a foolish, sloppy, naive and ignorant man.  The one comment that I cannot forgive is to be told that I lack the skill of Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich is not a historian, he is an extreme right-wing propagandist who supports utterly unacceptable policies.  To have had my work even compared with his is incredibly insulting.

There is no point fighting against the strength of opinion regarding my books.  Clearly their very existence offends people and so I am removing all the counter-factual history books from sale and will eliminate all the references from this blog.  I will keep my novels active until the torrent of abuse comes about them.  In this age of indignation it is a mistake to put yourself in a position where people are able to pour vitriol on what you do.  The personal cost is high.

Password Pressure

How many passwords do you have to remember? I have lost track of the ones I need not only to get into work systems but simply to shop online. Often I need one to access my account on the company website and then a subsequent one to actually pay for the system and then that is often backed up by a third verification from the company providing the card I am buying with. It is probably alright to remember the ones you use regularly, though I am no longer in the situation to buy CDs and DVDs with the frequency I might once have used. The greater difficulty is with those that I might visit only once per year, for example, to order vacuum cleaner bags or to apply for a job with a particular company. You need a password for almost every job application and yet there is little chance even if it is a company you really want to work for, that a suitable vacancy will only come up once every three months, perhaps only once in a year.

 Of course, many systems now have ‘do you want to be reminded of your password?’ and for me that has almost become the default setting, hoping that I have remembered which email account I locked this particular company’s website too. Given that I applied for 80 jobs last year with about 70 companies, trying to remember so many different accounts was a real labour. What can be particularly frustrating is that ‘to increase security’ you can find that the reminder or more often these days the option to choose to reset the password only turns up an hour or two later. Thus, your window of opportunity for buying the item or filling in a lengthy job application has passed by the time you can get in.

 One thing that irritates me is being told to alter my password just because a certain period of time has passed. The worst situation for this was in a job in the early 2000s where you had to change your password every month and were not allowed to repeat a password until you had used nine others. Trying to come up with things that you could remember was a really trick. Ultimately you end up writing them down or putting them in a file on your computer, so all of this fuss about security is compromised. My current job insists on a change every 3 months. I had the same password for my Hotmail email account from 1999-2010 and it was never hacked, yet this was felt by MSN to be too long a time without change and I was told to change it to one with greater ‘strength’. Having done this, a few weeks later, my account proceeded to be hacked for the first time. My password for my ‘World of Warcraft’ account now has 13 characters in it as the one 9 characters long proved too easy to break for hackers. YouTube insisted that I change the password I use to access that just recently. However, it kept rejecting my suggestions as too ‘weak’ and it was a battle to come up with a password and numbers that satisfied it and I can say that a month on I have forgotten what it was.

 Passwords are supposed to be about security but generally they seem more effective at locking out the actual user than those attacking the account. Software can try millions of words even those in Japanese that I tend to use, in seconds and yet I can end up spending hours trying to get into my account and often abandon the attempt. It has never been so hard to buy something than in the 21st century. Most of what I have access to is of no interest to any criminal. I certainly have no belief that a hacker would alter my job application in order to reduce my ‘O’ levels. I suppose they could put their address in place of mine, and, assuming that I got an interview, go in my place, but even then, to get the job they would have to manufacture fake qualification certificates. If they are that skilled then they would not be going for the kind of jobs I am going for, currently not even at the level of middle management. I guess they could divert a DVD I have bought or buy lots of things on my cards, but I do not have the wealth that would make it really worth the effort. I guess this is the same for most people and yet we are subjected to a password regime which would suggest we all have access to state secrets. The last company laptop I was issued needed thumbprint verification to switch it on. No-one seemed to spot the irony when I asked whether we had ones equipped with the same facilities as those red boxes issued to ministers which measure skin temperature to check that the thumb has not been simply cut off the legitimate user.


It is not only ever changing passwords of sufficient strength that cause problem but the username or login name that goes with it that adds an extra dimension. Every company has a different protocol and I battle to remember whether they wanted my surname and initials, one initial, two initials, together or spaced with full stops; perhaps this one wanted my entire name or was it the email account or was it some other form of designation that they assigned me? Of course, often you can ask, if you know which email account you used, have the username reminder sent, naturally with the ‘security’ delay. Sometimes this is not possible and you reach the bind into which I have found myself slipping. Apparently not being known by the company I try to set up a new account and then are told that there is already an account in that name but they cannot tell me the password to it. This is one reason for having more than one email account as I am then compelled to start up a new account in a different email name all for one application to a job which at best I have a 3 in 8 chance of getting.

 Sometimes systems are even more frustrating especially when combined with rapid ‘timing out’. I have commented before that job application sites are the worse for this. The extreme case was the one which timed me out between me deciding on a username and entering a password. Trying to re-access the system I was told there was already an account in this name and yet, of course, they could not send me the password to access it as one had not been designated. I abandoned online applying and rang them to be told that many people suffered this problem with their system. I felt it was futile to suggest they have it amended. In another case a company was charging me for virus protection I had not ordered. The bill sent me directions how to unsubscribe from the service, but going to the site it told me, as I already knew, that I had no account with the company, thus it was impossible to unsubscribe for the service which I was paying for! Trying to contact the company was almost impossible if you had no account as you had to log-in in order to send them a customer email and I was very fortunate to find a technical service email address on a discussion board that I used to get in through the ‘back door’ to reach customer services.

 Doing business online loses much of its appeal when it is such a labour to access what you need to get into. The obsession with security especially for services you only use once a year or even less, is a real irritation. Every site seems to assume that they are the only people you deal with. I wish we had the ‘single sign-in’ approach adopted by universities which allows students, once they have signed into the university system to access a whole raft of e-books and online journals without having to sign in again to each one individually as used to be the case in the early 2000s. Bank accounts are the systems which do need greatest security, but interestingly they have moved away from passwords towards the devices which generate one-off code numbers. I know ‘World of Warcraft’ have introduced these too, but maybe it is time for Amazon and eBay to follow likewise. Of course, then we will have a desk full of these devices and we will leave the vital one we need at home.

 The whole issue of passwords stems from the fact that no-one ever envisaged the internet to be such a crime-ridden place as it has proven to be or that so many people would put effort into peddling so much junk across systems. The internet is the distillation of the worst in human behaviour and despite constant efforts to portray it as something worthwhile it is like opening a library in the most run-down part of a city that had a vast proportion of criminals waiting to leap on anyone going to that library. Despite all the efforts over passwords and their strength, it appears that this is more of benefit to the ‘job’s worth’ attitudes of those people (very numerous these days) who like to make a fuss about regulations simply to give themselves an iota of importance, rather than providing any genuine security. For the average user like myself, trying to recall a string of passwords (even if you try to keep to a familiar few) and precisely what username you selected or were given many months ago, these concerns are increasingly making doing anything on the internet slower than telephoning in an order and, on occasion, actually physically going to the shop or office.

Publishing On Demand: Sales the Only Quality Control?

I have a feeling that there are going to be fewer postings on this blog in 2009 than in the past. Though, if, as I anticipate, I lose my job in August and my house in December (possibly sooner) then I will have a lot more to write about the difficulties of finding work and renting again after reposession. The newspapers are jammed with information about collapse and especially unemployment. Having lived through the 1980s, the one thing I must say is that at least the government is making some efforts to ameliorate the situation with schemes for the unemployed, especially the young who are over-represented and trying to kick the banks into freeing up credit flows. In the 1980s, the government did nothing except worsen the situation, such as by shutting down the coal industry. We were told it was 'necessary' and that to complain about it we were naive or foolish and if we were out of work we were lazy. Of course the people saying that were in good jobs and saw their salaries rise. I do not think the government will achieve much in countering what is a global problem but at least this time we will not be made to feel guilty for the foolish policies of bankers and/or the government. I just wish the woman in my house, like many others would refuse to discuss it. She complained last year that I was overly gloomy when I simply predicted a slight fall in house prices and now when things are many times worse than I said they would be she still complains that I should not discuss the impact on this household. Effectively I need to move to the Midlands where there is work in my field and hanging on while my company sheds more and more jobs is short-sighted and will lead to more upheaval in the end.

Anyway, this was not meant to be a posting about the economy, you can find enough about that at present at every turn. Instead I was going to look at a trend which anyone who has been interested in writing fiction will have been aware for the past few years: publishing on demand. Living in Milton Keynes it was a trend that was apparent locally because we had a big Amazon warehouse near us and the online booksellers Amazon, is the major outlet for published-on-demand books. Now, I am not really certain what the difference between published-on-demand and vanity-published books is. Someone I know who is about to publish-on-demand recently condemned another author had had published that way as simply spent on vanity publishing, so it seems that even authors operating in this field are uncertain about the boundaries.

Vanity publishing was around certainly throughout the 20th century and probably for much of the 19th century. You paid a fee to a disreputable publisher, equivalent to some thousands of pounds these days and they told you your novel was wonderful and published it, but did nothing to market it or promote it. To some extent with the cost of promotion and the uncertainty of sales, many mainstream publishers have sort of moved in this direction anyway. They would not charge you a fee, but if they accept your book as being worthwhile publishing, they will do that but then leave most of the marketing and selling up to you. They do take the risk of publishing the books but reduce their overheads by adopting this approach. To some extent it fits the standard publisher's view that the author sells their book rather than the book selling the book. Intriguing authors can make sales of poor quality books and boring, mudane authors will bring down the sales of even the best written or interesting book. Having publication by a proper publisher, however, for you as an author is nice, because you feel that your book has been approved on the basis of quality. In addition you have not had to pay the vanity publishers' fees, but, even so, your book may rarely appear in any bookshop and its sales may be very low.

Technology shifted the balance in the 2000s. With the computerisation of printing it was possible to simply run off a single copy of a book rather than spend time and effort resetting the printing presses for each one. It did mean that unit costs do not fall the more you print, it costs the same per unit if you print one or ten thousand, but it did allow publishers, and increasingly authors to match supply more closely to demand rather than filling up those remaindered bookshops which still seem to be present in every town with unsold stock. I suppose it is better for the environment too. Perhaps, also, publishers will be willing to take more risk and publish books from different genres that are less mainstream, less worried that they will be left with loads of unsold books if a gamble does not pay off.

With publishers expecting authors to do more of (or entirely) their own marketing, some authors have moved towards a much more direct connection between themselves and their reader/buyer. Back in the early 2000s I attended a talk by a man who had retired early and had gone on various travels around the World, increasingly sponsored for charity and he had begun writing up his exploits as books. He had paid to have these published-on-demand and what he was doing was going around the UK to individual bookshops and offering to signings and talks. There he would take orders and then telephone his publisher and run off just as many books as he needed. He of course had a few samples with him and he would pay a fee to the bookshop for hosting him. He also spoke at other venues like writers' groups, book groups, womens' groups, etc. which had lower overheads for him. In return they got an entertaining speaker. Now, obviously not all of us can tramp around the country selling our books in this way, but it is the path for some. The way more people can do it is via the internet. It is not difficult to have a website set up to sell your books. You can even simply sell them through eBay if you like. There are overheads but they are comparatively small and no doubt you will soon get a feel for if your book is going to sell.

The relationship with publish-on-demand publisher is not free. You pay a fee but usually of only a few hundreds of pounds, well below the old vanity rates. In addition, the more you are willing to do yourself, such as typeset and design the book cover, the cheaper the rate is. The best thing, though, is to make sure you get a page on Amazon because they you become open to the global, English-speaking market. Of course you may never sell thousands, but for the average author even knowing one hundred people have bought their book and are most likely reading it, is a huge step forward from just having it read by friends and family. Of course, you do not even have to have a paper copy, I came across a woman who writes Jane Austen pastiches, who just sells e-books of them off her website. Now, presumably there is sufficient demand otherwise she would not have kept bothering. She still seems to be there even seven years since I first ran across her.

The issue that arises is about quality. Getting a book published in the traditional way you first had to attract the attention of an agent because publishers hate getting books sent directly too them. Getting an agent could be difficult especially if you were writing in a genre which was not mainstream. Then your agent had to find a publisher who would read it and even the best agents were not 100% successful in doing this even for good authors. Then the publisher had to approve your book and move ahead to publishing it. All of this could take time. There was an assumption that poor quality books would not get through, though we all know that that is not the case. Think about all the 'bonk busters', 'shopping novels', 'airport thrillers', celebrity 'auto'-biographies that get produced and sold in large numbers. In particular, influential people often write books whether fiction or non-fiction that get published with little concern for quality and anyone, like me, who has been involved in writers' groups know there are tens of authors in each county who write excellent stuff that will never be published. However, with publish-on-demand there is no quality control. Anyone who can pay to have their novel published in this way will get it out there, and this is why I feel there remain overlaps with vanity publishing.

The one element of quality control of publish-on-demand books is customer demand. If no-one buys the book, none will be printed and presumably no-one will be waiting for the author's next book. The worst of it will be that it is held in some Kb on a computer somewhere until author or publisher decides to delete it. You can argue that publishing on demand is truly democratic publishing. However, this neglects the issue about how people find out about the books in the first place. I was asked by a friend of a friend how he could publicise his gothic-style contemporary thriller more effectively. It had been published by a proper publishers, not on demand, it had its Amazon page but people were oblivious to it. He might as well have published-on-demand and had to get out there and sell it himself. So, there is a need for the kind of publicity that publishers can give. Perhaps blogging can fill in part of this role. Back in July 2009 I followed a link to the 'Eve's Alexandria' blog: http://evesalexandria.typepad.com/ which is a blog book reviews by this Eve. I read very slowly, it takes me about three months to get through the average novel, otherwise I would be tempted to have a blog which reviewed publish-on-demand novels.

Quality control by sales can be seen as a way for good books to come to the fore, if only over a long period of time, and assuming they can get equal exposure. Of course, people writing for a particular genre, might simply want sales to a particular audience, such as Goths, and for them that is sufficient. I was interested in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Competition. Last year they had 5000 entries and these were whittled down to 800 from which excerpts were exposed to public vote on a regional basis. I contributed my views on a few, but was severely put off when it came to the final 10. They seemed to be the most blandest of the bland novels and I refused to comment on them thinking of the much better ones which had fallen by the wayside. Perhaps I am out of step with current trends in contemporary novels, but I did despair that the repeated distilling of novels from local, regional and national levels simply left us with the least offensive, but also the least engaging examples that had been produced. When they emailed me to see if I would comment on any novels in this year's competition, I simply ignored it, feeling there was no point in me contributing as the things I felt that were of the poorest quality will always win.

Perhaps being too democratic leads simply to sameness and we need an eclectic mix to creep in around the sides, and maybe published-on-demand novels provide that. Given my Gothic tastes I am much more likely to see novels that interest and even, dare I say it, excite me coming through the more informal route (though I acknowledge that the cost in itself is a filter keeping back a lot of the kinds of people who would be interested in Gothic fiction). Such 'leaking in' benefits the mainstream too. I do not know the total sales for the novel 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' by Louis De Bernieres but it sold over 420,000 copies on Amazon alone and was made into a Hollywood movie in 2001 (which he disliked, but I feel has a far more feasible, though more romantic, ending than the book). I would challenge you to name another of De Bernieres's novels, though he has written six, the first in 1990, and short stories too. 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' was first published in 1993 but it took over two years before there were any significant sales, and then it exploded. The reason for this was recommendation through word-of-mouth rather than any sophisticated marketing approach. To some extent his example has encouraged 'viral advertising' of new books and television programmes, though this does not always work the way people hope/expect.

So, not shaking off my concerns about quality control of publish-on-demand novels, I can see they are a way to get a wider variety of writing of all sorts of quality, some really excellent, out into the marketplace. I am optimistic that there will be quality control via sales, and if people want to pay to read poor quality novels, then I guess that it is their money.

If I had not had such a tough time financially (the capital gains tax was finally settled yesterday!!!) I might have been tempted to go down the path of publishing-on-demand. However, I now know that it would be an utter waste of time. I have been running this blog since May 2007 and it has some of my best writing on it, but not a single one of my novels has attracted a single comment. Clearly there is absolutely no demand for my writing. The novel I put on Gothic Steampunk Phantastic was read by 114 people in a year and that was probably because it was free. Perhaps authors thinking of publishing-on-demand should do what I have done, first, and test the water. If, like me, you generate not an iota of interest, instead spend the money on a decent graphics package, make up your own book cover and simply put a copy on your shelf where it will get the most appreciative audience.

P.P. 24/01/2009 - If you ever had any hope of being published except by paying for it yourself, something I read in 'The Guardian' today will douse that belief. Apparently, Harper Collins, just one of numerous publishers in the UK receives 1000 (one thousand) unsolicited novels every month. On top of this must be added the ones which they commission or come through agents. Publishers refer to where most of these novels end up as the 'slush pile'. Uniquely Harper Collins has introduced a rolling system a little like the Amazon breakthrough voting system, i.e. they allow authors to upload the novels on to a section called Authonomy. Apparently it already has 12,000 subscribers who read and rate the novels. Clearly if you are short of cash and want to get fiction for free or want to pass the time at your PC it is a good place to go. Some novels rise to prominence by being voted on by readers and Harper Collins has now given contracts to three that reached the top. While it is good that these authors received prominence, you do wonder about the quality. I anticipate that the same factors will prevail as with the Amazon competition and innovative novels will sink without trace and the most bland will float to the top. Interestingly, one that has succeeded actually has already been self-published, but the author uploaded it to Authonomy to get a better profile. Knowing the level of competition that I face has made me abandon hope of ever being published. Here is likely the only place you will ever see my fiction and given the lack of response, no-one out there is interested in it anyway.