by Ian Hocking
2003-2010
Déjà Vu All Over Again
An excerpt from a piece I wrote for Scott Pack’s blog, 18th March, 2011. Read the original
There was something familiar about the headline. I did a double-take.
It read:
HOCKING SELLS A MILLION
I spat out my tea in a brown fountain.
Finally! I thought. I can afford a new laptop—one that isn’t covered in tea.
And then it hit me. This was another Hocking. Not exactly another Ian Hocking—like that nice American estate agent who emails occasionally—but Amanda Hocking, a young woman in Minnesota who, it turns out, is making a healthy living from selling her ebooks directly through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Desperately, I reached for a pen, set about tapping it against my teeth, and thought about what all this could mean.
I’ve retired from fiction writing, partly because only one of my four novels has been published—and published in a special sense at that. Upon its release in 2005, if you walked into your local Waterstone’s the staff member you spoke to could order a copy as long as he or she knew about the special red phone underneath the till. It showed up on Amazon, which was great, and was listed there as Spanish, which was not so. Impishly, Amazon would never reply to emails about the error, and still don’t. The kindly reviews were nice for me to read but had no impact on sales because the supply was almost non-existent. You’d have to be one of those people who firmly decide that you wanted the book and go to Amazon and ignore the warning that the book was in Spanish and buy it without ever reading a sample. Basically, you’d have to be either Mum or Dad or my girlfriend.
So I’m looking at this Amanda Hocking headline. Flecks of tea are moving down the screen of my laptop like the raw Matrix. The half-formed idea in my head—that I can make a book available and I don’t need to have a publisher—becomes about three-quarters formed. My audience is going to be limited to a few million Kindle customers, but that’s like saying my writing is limited by the alphabet; it’s enough, and nobody is going to tell me that only Random House can use the ‘Q’.
Amazon has the Kindle and they are selling them cheap. The Kindle store is very large. People who own a Kindle—like your humble correspondent—tend to be delighted with them, even though they’re a bit wonky. I can, in moments, download a Mark Twain, or buy the latest Jonathan Franzen. The Kindle store contains upwards of 700,000 books and the chances of finding an author you care about are good.
Then you have Apple. Their iBooks store has potential. The iPad isn’t wonky but the iBooks store is. The chances of finding a tell-all biography of Steve Jobs are slim. On the flip side, the chances of finding Winnie the Pooh are great.
You also have Barnes and Noble, and various other outlets and channels.
Right now, if you’re going to place your eggs in just one basket, Amazon looks like a good bet. They have relationships (strained, but there) with publishers and no other manufacturer can yet beat their Kindle for price. Steve Jobs said that 2011 will be the year of the iPad 2, but the jury is still eating bad hotel food over whether it’s possible to enjoy long-form fiction on the device. I’d say the iPad isn’t suited to the job.
The iBooks system is a tricky one. To get your book in there, you need a publisher. Lulu.com will do the job. These guys will add a small surcharge to your book and let you publish it for free—which is fine until you try to produce an ebook in iBooks’ ‘epub’ format. This format seems a mite less stable that Kindle’s ‘mobi’ and needs to pass through an automatic validation service to verify that it’s a well-formed epub file. Trouble is, I couldn’t get Apple Pages to export my novel in an epub format that would validate, and the ebook will never appear on iBooks until that happens. I’m still scratching my head about it. Right now, iBooks is the wild west.
The other advantage that Amazon has is a system called ‘Direct Kindle Publishing’. Cryptically, this is a system that allows you to publish—to the Kindle—but directly. It has some tolerably exciting aspects. First, it’s worldwide. Second, you can designate up to 70% of the cover price as a royalty. Compare this to the rate you’d receive through a traditional publisher. Alas, it’s not straightforward to publish a book for free using this service. (This had been my original plan following my retirement.) Third, it won’t matter that editors, agents, et al. say to you ‘It’s brilliant, moving, and wonderfully written but, gee, my lapdog didn’t do the shit dance when I acted out the first scene and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this game it’s that SCHNOOKINS IS NEVER WRONG.’
Too bitter?
Anyway, it won’t matter. Your ebook will just appear.
The Kindle publishing platform accepts multiple formats. My advice is to take this advice. If you’re not scared to get at the HTML of the book itself, it will pay dividends because you won’t end up with a trailing carriage return, WingDing, or otherwise bizarre formatting thingy that you can’t get rid of.
One more tip: Use the Kindle emulator available from Amazon. This was recommended to me by m’writerly colleague Michael Stephen Fuchs—another technothriller author—and it’s invaluable. You’ll be able to produce versions of your book and see what the reading experience of it will be for a reader.
Now, the cover.
This is what separates the Cubs from the Scouts—at least in my opinion. Anyone who thinks the jacket isn’t important can probably point to the phenomenal success of ebooks with appalling covers, and they’d be half-right. Today, however, I’d say the cover is still important.
How much should your ebook, or any ebook cost? For inspiration about this, I look to two things: (i) the Apple IOS ‘app store’, where prices are quite low compared to the traditional rate for software (anything over a tenner needs to be special); and (ii) my own feeling that £6.99 is all well and good for a physical paperback but far too expensive for an ebook. I’ve settled for £1.71, which is Amazon’s conversion of the US price of $2.99.
I published the book a couple of weeks back and I’ve sold five copies. A small number? That’s five people who, three weeks ago, hadn’t read my book and were never going to while it pootled around the publishing houses of the world waiting for Schnookins to do the shit dance. Am I bitter? No, not really. The only publishers I know well are very nice people, but that doesn’t help Bob in Idaho get hold of my book when the mood takes him.
The thing is this: There is no print run. In six months’ time, whether five or fifty or five thousand units have been sold, it will still be available to millions of Kindle users in an instant. It will probably be there the year after that; and maybe for several years. By 2020, I might even have figured out how to get the bloody thing onto iBooks.
At the end of this edition of Déjà Vu, I’ve written:
Saskia Brandt will return in: FLASHBACK
Given that Déjà Vu is now out and about, there is a very good chance that Flashback—which has been in a holding pattern for several years—will finally be published this summer. I’ll let Amanda Hocking keep the millions of readers; me, I’ll settle for a few dozen and the occasional email from Bob in Idaho.
Free Excerpt from the Sequel, Flashback
Prologue: Autumn, 2003, near Regensburg, Germany
This was the place where Tolsdorf had come to die. North was the Bavarian Forest, a dark froth always visible, even on gloomy days. East: the rich plain of the Danube. To the south were the great stone feet of the Alps, and to the west the uplands of Franconia. He had grown to love this area during his work as a ranger for the forest authorities, and when government cuts made the position redundant, he had chosen to stay forever. The idea that he would die here, alone, no longer scared him, because as the twentieth century ended with the loss of his job, something had changed within Tolsdorf. He had reached an amicable divorce with himself. His eyes were steel grey now, not blue, and his hair was white, not blond. When he spat, perched on his rock overlooking the Danube, he looked down at the phlegm and noted t
he black flecks with indifference. Something was coming for him, alright, and it would find him here.
Tolsdorf kept a hut about half a kilometre away, down the eastern slope of a valley he called ‘the notch’. The roof and walls of the hut were prefabricated blocks camouflaged with wood drawn, as one might draw teeth, from the mouth of the forest. If a busybody came looking for the old ranger station, they would probably walk right past it. Nobody did come, though, apart from a charity volunteer from Regensburg called Frau Waellnitz who had heard the rumour of an old man in the woods. Tolsdorf tolerated her. He had even told her about the submerged concrete blocks that allowed a person to cross the river to the hut’s dooryard.
Frau Waellnitz was his last connection to society and Tolsdorf knew it. His habits had drifted towards the eccentric. For instance, he slept fully clothed, and liked to take that sleep—when it came—within a secret compartment behind the mirror in the main room of the hut. This compartment was lined with wire mesh because he had come to know these last three winters that people were manipulating his thoughts through focused radio waves. It was for this reason that Tolsdorf kept a loaded, well-maintained pistol on the stand next to his bed. Sometimes, when he could not sleep, and the river hissed louder and louder, he would swing his legs over the edge of the bed and put the pistol to his temple.
If Tolsdorf needed to keep something chilled, he put it in the river. Old batteries beneath the hut powered his lamps and his short-wave radio. To heat food, he had a blackened stove whose chimney continued some twenty metres into the dark colonnades behind the hut. As a boy, in the army, he had been shouted at by hard men. Told which berries to eat, and when. How to start a fire with a bow-drill. How to butcher out the edible parts of an animal. How to take his body to its extremes.
This he had now done. Tolsdorf had reached his last extreme. He did not expect to live through another winter. He would not let Frau Waellnitz take him from his hut. The skin of his heart was tight. It still vibrated to his sprint between the police and the fireman as those well-remembered flames rose through his former home in Regensburg.
~
He awoke in his cot, immediately sensing that something was wrong. Quite automatically, he scooped the pistol and trained it on the plywood reverse of the mirror door. He had a sense that something important was waiting at the extreme of his awareness. He sat quite still for ten seconds, counting them off. His forehead was sweaty. He saw sunlight in the air holes near the ceiling. Was it morning? No, he decided, patting his full stomach. It was afternoon. He had come into his compartment to nap.
He paused again as he heard a voice.
‘Help me.’
It came from the door. Tolsdorf was so certain that a boy stood beyond his secret portal, betraying his sovereignty, that he almost pulled the trigger. He tried to get up. He grunted and swore. He pushed the nose of the pistol into his nightstand and, with the little table wobbling, achieved the last of his height. His knees squeaked.
‘Help me,’ said the voice.
The impertinence of this repetition angered Tolsdorf. Surely, the voice belonged to a child on a dare. No doubt his friends had urged him on through the forest and pushed him across the threshold of the hut. Though could it be a woman’s voice? If so, was it a charity do-gooder? He nettled himself with thoughts of a stranger moving through the clutter around his stove, touching the remains of his lunch, pushing the hanging meats aside to find the secret compartment.
Tolsdorf would show them. He looked at the pistol. Though it was not his preferred weapon—that accolade fell to his rifle, which lay across the door lintel in the main chamber of the hut—the pistol would have to do. Tolsdorf could shoot the stranger, parcel the body in newspaper, and send it down the river to the town. But this future was ghostly. Absurd. Tolsdorf didn’t think he had the balls to shoot anyone.
He reached out with the hand of a weak, old man. He pushed the mirror-door open and stared into the gloom of the hut.
‘What do you want?’ he said. As ever, his throat felt dry when he spoke. He coughed and spoke louder. ‘Did you hear me? This is private property. What do you want?’
There was nobody there. He noted the swinging, drying animals, smelled their bloods, and saw his bread and cheese on the table. Nothing, as far as he could tell, had been disturbed. He stepped into the room proper. His boots creaked. There was nothing here but his disappointment at the dwindling of his anger, of its replacement with a sense of foolishness. At once, he saw him himself as the Regensburgers must see him: a silly man in a hut on a hill, dying.
But the words came again. This time, from behind.
‘Help me.’
Tolsdorf tried to spin but staggered clumsily, tasting once more the bitterness of idiocy. He had been out-flanked. As he turned, he told himself not to shoot, but the pistol’s trigger was lighter than the one on his rifle, and he loosed a round into the empty corner of the room, left of the mirror.
In the silence and gun smell, he said, ‘Who said that?’
Nothing.
Tolsdorf waited.
Then: ‘Help me.’
He noticed something strange about the words. They were scratchy, ill-defined, like a recording in wax. The idea came to Tolsdorf with a shock of insight as startling as the gunshot. He did not know how the idea had formed. To be sure, it was incredible: The voice had to be coming from the mirror itself. He approached the glass and put the barrel of his pistol against it. When ‘Help me’ came again he heard a second, harsh component in the sound. The mirror was indeed vibrating against his pistol. Though he could not explain this phenomenon, the discovery was nevertheless sweet. It confirmed his intellect was not yet erased; he could question the world and it would answer.
His questions now doubled and tripled. How could a voice come from the mirror? What would it take to do that? He had been a radio operator and a medic during his national service, and he had heard stories of mirrors and tooth fillings receiving radio transmissions. But this did not sound like a commercial radio station. It was a single voice and it was talking to him.
Before his wonder at this visitation could transform into fear, he heard a dull roaring sound from outside the hut.
Tolsdorf hurried to the door, opened it, and stepped onto his porch. What he saw and felt returned him to the morning his family died: the smell of paints, plastics and clothes on fire; the neighbours preventing his re-entry to the house; the certain conviction that his wife and his boys, the twins, were dying in each other’s arms in a wardrobe; and Tolsdorf, raging, shouting calls that remained unanswered.
Here, on the far side of the valley, a mushroom-cap cloud was turning about a yellow core, hundreds of metres high and climbing. A speck of ash fell on Tolsdorf’s tongue. His wonder grew with every gust of crisp bark and blasting air. He looked at the back of his hands. They were bald. The heat reached his eyes, dried them, and he backed against the hut. He put his knuckles to his nose. The hair was gone: burned.
~
He put the pistol on the table and pulled out the first-aid kit that he had never used. Then, feeling the charge of a life not yet spent, Tolsdorf took a blanket from his bed and left the hut. He was not responding to the mirror, he decided. He was investigating the explosion. He crossed the short dooryard and dunked the blanket in the river. Its sudden weight pulled him forward and he stumbled into the water. The cold found his feet through the eyelets of his boots. Old age was making him a clown. All the while, he felt the singeing of his eyebrows and the growing heat on his cheeks. Then he pulled the blanket about himself. It was cool—like night, his best and clearest time. He pulled down the peak of his cap and crossed the river in large strides that recalled the tall man he had once been.
There was a deer path that coiled around the western shoulder of the hill. Tolsdorf set himself upon it. His legs were pained with cramp and his knees clicked, but he walked this path every morning to claim the vantage of the hill, and with the familiarity came ease. His breath quickened. In t
he shelter here, the heat slackened and his mind calmed. That much fuel, in so isolated a location, could only mean that a plane had crashed. A large one. Tolsdorf shook out his bandana and covered his nose and mouth. Ash and wood cinders were falling through the forest canopy. Larger pieces—he saw a sheet of paper with a letterhead, a deformed plastic cup—pattered on the trees like fat drops of summer rain. And the smell rolled over him: a bloody stink of incineration.
He reached the top of the hill. Through streaming eyes, he saw that the forest had been wiped away. A foggy bowl of dirt remained. There was an ordinariness about the thin layer of debris. It might have been a steaming rubbish dump. Tolsdorf struggled to understand. How could this have been an aircraft? What could have happened to the mass of it? He could see part of one engine. On the far lip of the depression, almost one-hundred metres distant, was a tyre, still inflated. It was certainly an aircraft tyre. Nearer, he saw a paperback novel. He surprised himself by recognising the cream-and-blue cover. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Frau Waellnitz had wanted to read it to him months ago but Tolsdorf had dismissed the idea with a grunt, playing fully on her expectations of this backward woodsman. Then, as though the paperback unlocked his perception, he saw the scattered, broken pieces of people. His eyes faltered in the toxic air and the heat. He squeezed them shut and knelt fully, coughing.
Not so old to be useless, Tolsdorf. Move.
‘On three,’ he growled. ‘Three.’
He rose, settled the blanket around his shoulders, and walked into the debris. The surface was hot through his boots but the fires had shrunk to flickering islands. Now the ash fell upwards as well as down. He picked a route that took him from one ruined stump of tree to another, and he sometimes crouched, gasping, waiting for the next roll of smoke to pass, praying he would not collapse. His eyes felt ruined. He wanted to be sick but his retches produced only spit. He did not know what to do. There was no-one alive here. Beneath his boots were plastic cups, seat cushions, wiring, and things he would not name.
