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Continuing our re-run of popular marketing blogs first posted in February 2021  Strategy – it’s a big scary word used by clever people who earn lots of money. No it isn’t. Strategy isn’t that complicated, at least not as a concept. Really, all it means is knowing what result you want and working out a way to achieve that result using the resources you have available to you and then knowing when you have achieved your result. We already know what result you want – you want to sell your book. "social media, which is a resource you can use for free" This weekly blog is discussing the ways that you can achieve that result using social media, which is a resource you can use for free (or, at least, quite cheaply). And you will know if you achieve your results if your book sales increase. Actually, there are some other things you can measure along the way to tell if you if you are heading in the right direction, but we’ll cover them later.  You can write your whole social media marketing strategy in five bullet points or less. Here’s ours:
As you can see, it isn’t exactly rocket science. There are other layers of actions below those five, but as someone once asked – how do you eat an elephant? The answer is: one bit at a time (apologies to vegans and wildlife preservation activists – but it’s only a metaphor). "each audience is unique," Last week we looked at identifying the target audience for your book(s), but that only takes your strategy to the first bullet point. Because each audience is unique, we have to engage with them in unique ways. This is why blasting out generic Tweets doesn’t work. You need to understand the “organic reach” of your social media marketing channels to get the best out of them. Let’s take Young Adult (YA) fiction as an example.  YA fiction is aimed at readers in the 12 to 18 age group. They are social media savvy and they are usually on the latest and trendiest social media platforms. If your idea of social media is Facebook, then you are onto a loser with the YA audience. Only 51% of teenagers who use social media use Facebook, the second smallest group after the over 65s. Even Twitter is a bit old hat for them, taken over by oldies who only want to argue about politics. "Even Twitter is a bit old hat for them" But there is more to it than that. YA readers have to go to school and they aren’t allowed to use their phones or other devices during school hours, except for schoolwork. The best time to engage with YA readers is going to be during the evening, typically between 7 and 10 pm. But that’s when you are sitting down with a mug of cocoa, watching Corrie and Midsomer Murders (TV programmes may vary by nationality). When we talk about the organics of social media, we are really talking about the way your messages “grow” and get noticed. It’s like applying fertiliser to a plant. Put it down at the right time and in the right place and the plant will flourish. But put it down at the wrong time and the rain will wash it away and the plant will wither and die and if you put it in the wrong place it won’t get to the roots of the plant, with the same result.  YA is a good example of this, because young people love sharing things on social media – far more so than their elders. So hit the YA audience with the right message at the right time and it won’t just reach the ones who follow you, it will be shared with all their friends as well. And then their friends will share it and so on and so forth. If you do it right, you may even “go viral” and your message will be seen by millions of YA readers around the world. But on the other hand, the YA audience is the most challenging to reach because they respond best to visual images – particularly video. That’s why Tik-Tok is currently the fastest growing social media platform on the planet. But how do you get a message out about your books on Tik-Tok? We’re not going to answer that question - yet.  The first plant you have to nurture and grow is your own social media presence. If you are an author using Twitter and you have only 100 followers – you haven’t got a social media presence. Until your followers number in the thousands, probably tens of thousands, your social media presence isn’t going to help you at all. This is when people get tempted to buy “followers”. Well, it’s your money and if you want to waste it, that’s your privilege. Because most paid for followers aren’t real people, they are bot (robot) accounts. They only exist as a username. And bots don’t buy books. "If you are an author using Twitter and you have only 100 followers – you haven’t got a social media presence." The cleverest of these bots re-Tweet other people’s Tweets, just so they can appear more human. Strangely, people actually follow some of these bot accounts, including other bots, so you have bots following bots. Crazy, isn’t it? You know those bios that say “Follow me and I’ll follow you back”? How do you know you aren’t following a bot? A lot of bot accounts are used to bombard people with advertising. OK, I know that sounds hypocritical when we’re blogging about social media marketing, but at least we’re real people (honestly – we are!).  There is an app called Tweepi which will help you to gain followers over time. It’s a bit of a blunt instrument, based on the idea that if you follow a lot of people, some of them will follow you back. You have to pay to use some of their features, but you can also get a free account with a limited range of features, which is enough to get you started. At the end of this blog you'll find a guide written by someone who has used Tweepi to gain thousands of followers, so please feel free to download it. If you are prepared to spend twenty minutes a day on Tweepi you can probably add about a hundred new followers a week to your Twitter account. The real secret, however, is to attract more followers because of the stuff you post on social media. This is your “engagement strategy”. Let’s say that when you identified your audience characteristics (the homework we set last week), you thought that many of your audience would probably be dog lovers. So, if you Tweet lots of things about dogs, anyone who likes dogs is going to be interested in reading your Tweets.  Not only will they read your Tweets, but they may re-Tweet (RT) the best ones. That will bring you more followers. But, more importantly, if your Tweets get lots of “likes”, they are more likely to appear at the top of peoples’ Twitter feeds, which makes them more likely to be seen. That’s how social media algorithms (horrible technical term) work these days. If your Tweets are the first ones that are seen, they are more likely to be read and they are more likely to be RT’d and because of the number of likes, they are more likely to bring you new followers. That’s organic growth in a nutshell (groan at bad pun). If you are good at it, you will soon have more followers than people you follow yourself – just like Katie Perry or Steven Fry.  The whole point about “social media” is that it is social and that means engaging with other people first, taking an interest in what they have to say. So, the other thing you can do is engage in conversations about other people’s posts. If you are engaged, then other people in the conversation may find what you have to say interesting enough to want to follow you and, of course, you want to follow them. It’s another way of getting organic growth. "The whole point about “social media” is that it is social" You will notice that I haven’t mentioned promoting your books. It’s OK to do that, but Tweet about dogs (or whatever) far more frequently. A ratio of 10:1 is probably about right. You also have to Tweet everyday if you can. People follow accounts if they are obviously active. An account that hasn’t Tweeted for more than a few days is probably a bot account or is engaged in some sort of scam and is just trying to identify new victims. These last few paragraphs have mainly been about Twitter and that is because it is the easiest platform to demonstrate the points we wished to make. But the same basic rules apply to all the other social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest et al: social first, commercial second. It’s a hard lesson to learn if you want quick results, but if you want to be in this for the long haul, it is worth taking the time. And, more importantly, if you want to see your sales growing, you have to be in it for the long haul.  That doesn’t suit the generations who are used to “instant gratification”, so they have to learn to be patient. If you have only written the first chapter of your book, or even the first paragraph, then now is the time for you to start engaging with your audience. That way you will already have an engaged audience by the time your book is published. But it’s never too late, so even if your book has been out for years, you can start today. You will probably have worked out by now that this is all very time consuming. Which is why some Indie authors choose to use (small) publishers to do this for them. But not all small publishers are equal, as I explained in a previous blog. The accounts and websites that offer to send out Tweets for you aren’t willing to spend the time to do it right. If you pay for someone to Tweet about your books (probably using a Tweet that you had to compose in the first place), that’s all they’ll do. There will be no attempt to establish any sort of social engagement. OK Selfishgenie Publishing, put your money your money where your mouth is - what are you doing to engage with your audience?  You’re reading this blog, aren’t you? That is part of our engagement strategy. We identified the fact that if you are an Indie author, you are going to be interested in knowing how to market your books. If you are an author then, almost by definition, you are a reader too. So, we’re publishing this series of blogs so that you will engage with us and we can engage with you. You might take a look at our books while you’re here or you might not, but that doesn’t matter. It is the engagement that matters. In previous blogs we have used some of our books as examples of what we were talking about. It comes as no surprise (to us) that our sales for those books went up a little bit after those blogs were posted. I mentioned at the top of this blog that there are some measurements that will help you work out whether your strategy is working or not and social media provides some easy measurements for you to use: Number of followers, number of RTs and number of likes. If those numbers keep going up, then your engagement strategy is working. Some sites offer even more “analytics”, such as where in the world people engaged and your most popular Tweets/posts. You might want to take a look at them to see what they might tell you and what you can learn from them. For us here at Selfishgenie we also measure “number of visits to our website”. When you clicked on the link to get here, you showed up on our metrics (more jargon, it means the way we measure success). Do you read a lot of blogs? Many are part of someone’s engagement strategy. Don’t worry about that though. The important thing is whether or not you find the blog interesting or entertaining.  In terms of the “marketing mix”, engagement on social media falls under two different Ps: Place and Promotion. Place is the “channels” that are used: FB, Twitter et al and Promotion is the messages that you put out to help you engage with people. Next week we’re going to take a more in depth look at blogs and also look at using extracts and teasers to promote your work. We hope you have found this blog entertaining or informative - or both. If you want to be sure not to miss the next edition, just sign up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. 
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Continuing the re-runs of our series of marketing blogs first published in February 2021  I’m starting this week’s blog with some basic maths for you. Let’s say you write at a rate of 1,000 words every two hours and you produce a book that is around 90,000 words long. That means that it took you about 180 hours to write. Those 180 hours may be spread over a few weeks, a few months or even a few years, but it doesn’t matter. If you were to pay yourself the UK national minimum wage (July 2022) for your work, you would get £9.50 per hour if you are over 22. So, multiply the number of working hours by the hourly rate and it means that you need to receive £1,710 in “royalties”, just to pay you for the time taken to write your book, which doesn’t include time spent editing, re-writing, proofreading, formatting, up-loading and marketing. But we’ll keep it simple and call it £1,700. If you sell your book as an ebook on Amazon for £4.99, which is a typical price for an Indie author, you will receive about £3 in royalties, which means you need to sell 566 books just to cover your wages for writing the book. "You need to sell 566 books just to cover your wages." But if you are signed to a publisher, you can expect to receive about 50% of your royalties, because the publisher takes the other 50% to cover the work they do (they don’t work for minimum wage). That means you need to sell 1,133 books to earn £1,700. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? There are many self-published authors who sell a lot more books than that. Actually, that is quite a lot of books for an unknown author to sell. So, the unknown author has to find a way to become a “known” author and that is where marketing comes in. There are 4,000 new books published every day, that’s over 115,000 a month. Most of those books will be by unknown authors and most of those authors will remain unknown – unless they learn how to market their product. Trust me, 1,133 people aren’t going to stumble across your book by accident.  If you don’t believe me, just upload your book onto Amazon, don’t do anything else or tell anyone about the book and see how many copies you have sold after 6 months. I can tell you exactly how many it will be – 0. But if I’ve got a publisher, why do I need to do the marketing? A good question. All authors, even those signed to big publishing houses, have to do some marketing – remember it’s the authors that do the book tours and radio interviews, not the publishers, and those are marketing activities just as much as the sort of things I’m going to talk about. But the short answer is that your publisher has several authors on which to concentrate, but you can concentrate on you. Double the marketing activity means double the likelihood of selling some books. You have to work as a team on this to get the best results. But this blog is actually aimed at all Indie authors, so this is aimed at the self-publishing community just as much as at the published community. "So this is aimed at the self-publishing community" The problem is that marketing costs money. How much it costs will depend on a number of things. If you are good at it, it may cost you nothing because your costs will be more than covered by your income. If you aren’t any good at it, it could cost you quite a lot of money to get somebody else to do it for you. This is where “social media marketing” comes in, because that is the cheapest form of marketing there is, short of standing on street corners and shouting about your book. However, just putting something on Facebook or Tweeting about your book isn’t going to work. Why not? Let me use an analogy.  Let’s say you live in a house and on the wall outside your house you hang a loudspeaker. Inside you have a microphone connected to the speaker (for the nerds, yes it is connected through an amplifier). Then you close the curtains so you can’t see the street. Now you stand in your room, speaking into the microphone saying “buy my book” over and over again. Will this sell your book? First of all, you don’t know if there are any people outside your house to hear your announcement. At some times of the day the street might be quite busy, but at others it will be empty. Secondly, even if people are there, you don’t know if they read books and, thirdly, even if they read books, you don’t know what sort of books they read. If they don’t read books like yours then you are wasting your time. "Your announcements are getting lost amongst theirs." But it’s worse than that. Because there are 99 other houses in your street and in each one of them there lives another author and all 100 of you are doing exactly the same thing, so your announcements are getting lost amongst theirs and theirs are getting lost amongst yours. And that is why social media marketing fails for so many authors. Which means that just posting on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter is probably not going to sell you many books. Which brings me to paid services.  There are dozens, even hundreds, of online suppliers offering to Tweet your book to their gazillion followers – at a price. The problem is that they are doing exactly what I have described in my analogy. Which means you are paying them to do something that you already know doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how many followers they have, or how many likes their FB and Insta accounts get, if they aren’t reaching the right people, they aren’t selling your book for you. Our recommendation is not to pay for services like that. "you are paying them to do something that you already know doesn’t work" But if social media marketing doesn’t work, why do so many businesses spend so much money on it? Because it does work, but not if you just stand in your house shouting “buy my book”. There is a science behind social media marketing and if you learn how to use that science, your book will sell.  If you have been following this series of blogs you will know that we are great advocates of “learning” and this is something else you can learn about. This course with Future Learn is free and serves as a good starting point. It is only two weeks of study (you could complete it in a day if you felt like it) and you can sign up from anywhere in the world. And it isn’t just for authors – any small business can use social media marketing. The best use of social media marketing isn’t actually to sell books – it’s to raise “brand awareness”. It’s about getting your name and the title of your book into people’s memories so that when they go looking for books to buy on actual book selling sites, they will recognise your name or your book’s title and think “I know his/her name” Or “I know that title”. They then think “Why do I know that name (or title)? I must have heard something about it. I wonder if it's any good”. And that is where your sales “closure” kicks in – the book’s blurb and it’s few pages on “Look Inside”. But if you’ve gone for obscure or weird usernames on Facebook, Twitter or Insta, then you may have shot yourself in the foot because the name under which your write may not be instantly recognisable – so think about that. In last week’s blog I listed the 6Ps of marketing and I said I’d return to them. So, I’m going to start with that first P – product and how it relates to social …. Tell you what, let’s call it SMM for short. What is your product?  Yeeeees, it’s a book, we know that. But is it just a book? For example, is it fiction or non-fiction? There’s no point in trying to sell a fiction book to someone who only reads non-fiction. Next, what genre is it? Some people read only one genre, some read a few different genres and some people read anything and everything. The problem is, you have to assume that they only read one genre and that it is yours. "This is called audience targeting" So, what does your reader look like? If you write in the same genre as you read, then they may be people just like you. But if you write in several different genres, you may have several different types of reader and you need to address each one in a different way. You won’t attract a reader of Young Adult (YA) fiction in the same way as you attract a reader of military history – they are two very different people. This is called audience targeting. If you know what your audience looks like and behaves like, then you can target them better. You can be online, on Twitter for example, at the same time of day as them. You can shape your marketing messages in a way that appeals to them. Most importantly, you can engage with them.  Because social media marketing isn’t about advertising, it is about engagement. If you can establish a relationship with your target audience – even if it is only via a social media platform, they are more likely to take an interest in you and more likely to take an interest in your work. I’ll give you a frinstance (as my Mum called it). If your ideal reader is likely to have an interest in brewing craft beer and you have an interest in brewing craft beer, you can engage with them by talking about craft beer brewing. The fact that you are also an author becomes incidental. One day they may decide to look at your profile on whatever social media platform you are using and then they will discover that you are an author, at which point they may take a look at your book(s). But you haven’t forced it on them. "and that’s the battle half won." But, importantly, if they’re browsing Amazon looking for new books they may come across your name and remember you as a nice person who likes craft beer brewing as much as them – and they’ll take a look at your books. Or, they may see one of your actual announcements about your book and say to themselves “Oh, I didn’t realise he/she was an author as well as being a craft beer brewing enthusiast. I wonder what his/her books are like?” and they might take the time to find out. Because you have done your research on your “ideal” audience, the chances are they will read the sort of books you write and that’s the battle half won. Does this sound like manipulation? We’d prefer to think of it as understanding human behaviour. In any business of any size, there are people earning salaries far bigger than mine who are “understanding human behaviour” and using it to sell you something. At least you do have a genuine interest in craft beer brewing (or whatever). BTW, engagement doesn't mean just asking questions, as many people do on Twitter or Facebook. Unless you get involved in a conversation about the answers, you aren't engaged, you are just annoying people by not engaging.  So, a bit of homework for you for next week. Draw a pen picture of your ideal reader. Here’s a few things for you to consider:
Identifying your target audience is an important first step in your marketing strategy.
Strategy: that’s a big scary word. Don’t let it scare you though because it is far easier to understand than you may think. It is the implementation of the strategy that is actually the hard part. But I’m getting ahead of myself. See you next week (I hope). If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative (both, we hope) and you want to make sure you don't miss the next edition, just sign up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a free ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. Continuing a re-run of our series of marketing blogs, just in case you missed them first time around.  I’m going to be honest with you up front. To market your book properly you really need to do a business management course with a strong marketing focus, then work in a marketing department or consultancy for several years to gain experience. But you haven’t got time for that, so you read blogs about marketing instead. Fortunately, one of our team (me) has a Masters in Business Administration and knows a bit about marketing, so we can post this blog and not worry about being accused of not knowing what we’re talking about. But it is a complex subject and in a blog all we can really do is scratch the surface and provide you with a few pointers to get you heading in the right direction.  Our starting point is the “6Ps”, aka “The Marketing Mix”. These are the six areas on which a marketing strategy is based. Get them right and you have a fighting chance of selling your product – any product. Get them wrong and you are going to struggle to sell anything. Pretty much anything you have ever bought that isn’t an essential to your survival, you have bought as a consequence of responding to the marketing mix. Even the brand you have selected in preference to another brand is as a result of successful marketing. You are even reading this blog because of marketing. "You are even reading this blog because of marketing." Marketing is so ubiquitous that we hardly even notice it. Note that I haven’t used the word “advertising” so far. That is because advertising is just one small part of the marketing mix – though it is the bit that probably costs the most. But what are the 6 Ps? They are:
 But before that we’re going to talk about book covers. Why? Because they are actually part of your marketing mix. They are a “promotion” tool. But they are so important that they need a whole blog of their own. They say “Never judge a book by its cover” (African Journal of American Speech, 1944 - the original version actually said “spine”, which is even more pertinent). But people judge books by their covers all the time. And they will judge your book by its cover too. "And they will judge your book by its cover too." Imagine you are in your favourite bookshop, looking for your next read. You browse along the line of shelves and all you can see is the books' spines. On the spine you will see two things: the author’s name and the book’s title. The rest of the spine is just coloured paper and maybe a few stray lines from the book’s cover that the designer wrapped around to make it look more interesting.  You will be drawn to the book either by the author’s name – it is familiar to you - or by the book’s title - it is intriguing and you want to know more. So, you pull the book off the shelf and you read the blurb, which is either on the rear cover or on an inside page where it’s easy to find. By the end of reading that you are halfway to buying the book. You may, by now, have noticed the front cover, but you may not have. But on a website, you aren’t just presented with the things you are in a bookshop. On a website you can see the entire front cover of the book. If it grabs your attention it may draw you in before you even know the author’s name or you read the book’s title. So, the cover of the book is now a vital ingredient of your marketing strategy. Whatever we are here at Selfihsgenie, we’re not experts on book cover design, but we know that if you put the right cover on the right book, it will sell. It needs to tell you something either about the plot or about the main character(s). Most of all it needs to tell you something that will make you want to read the blurb.  Look at the cover for Stalker, which is one of the books we publish. The cover is dominated by a shadowy, menacing figure. Straight away you know that this is a book about menace and threat, it is trying to unnerve you and make the hairs on your neck stand on end. It is probably more unnerving for a woman, which is unsurprising as it was written by a woman, but some men may also feel threatened by it. If you like books that do that, you may want to know more, in which case you will probably read the blurb and, if the website offers the facility, you may “look inside” and start reading the story. You are well on your way to buying that book. In fact, statistically, you are more likely to buy it than to not buy it. BTW, you can click on the image to find out more. There are a few ways to go about getting the right cover for your book. We’ll start with the cheapest.  If you are an artist or designer, you can do it for yourself. One of our author’s was lucky; his sister* is an artist and because the book is a biography of their father, she was willing to design the cover for free. And it is a particularly good example of what we’re talking about. It’s the image shown alongside. I don’t know about you, but when I saw that face I wanted to know more about the man behind it. The eyes, in particular, have a quality that invites the question “What sort of man is he?” and to find out the answer, you have to read the book. Which is why we published the book. I’m not going to pretend it’s one of our best sellers, it’s in a very niche genre, but it has sold enough copies to justify its presence in our catalogue. Again, you can click on the image to find out more  The next cheapest option is to find a designer online who will design your book cover. There are plenty plying for hire on Fiverr.com and some of them are very good. Prices vary, you can get a simple design for about $20, but anything that requires more work is going to cost more. It is necessary to be very clear about what you want from your designer. They will do what they’re asked to do and they won’t read your book first to find out what it is about. This means that you need some sort of idea of what you want your cover to look like before you brief them. "The style must suit the genre of book. " The style must suit the genre of book. Moody sunlight over wildflower meadows, women in big bonnets and hunky men with their shirts open to the waist are fine for romances, but they aren’t going to sell you many sci-fi books or spy thrillers. So, make sure you understand what the norm is for your genre. It’s fine to be original and mould breaking, but only within the “rules” for your genre.  My recommended start point would be to go onto Amazon (or any other bookselling website) and browse through the books that are on offer, within your genre. Try to ignore the titles and author’s names. Just focus on the cover images. Which ones stand out for you and which ones don’t? The answer to that will inform what you ask your designer to do. If necessary, copy an image and send it to the designer and say “something like that!” Many designers work with Photoshop or similar software to merge and overlay images. That’s fine if they produce the result you want. But remember, you have to own the right to use the image(s).  If you didn’t take the photo(s) yourself, you don’t own the copyright and you can end up in trouble if you use the image without the copyright owner’s permission. And it doesn’t have to have the © symbol displayed for you to be liable. There are hundreds of thousands of images available on websites such as Depositphotos and Shutterstock (and similar sites) and their general licences allow you to use them for book covers (sometimes up to a maximum number of copies sold). Bite the bullet and buy from them. Yes, you can go onto a search site such as Bing Images and select the filter that says “Free to share and use commercially” – but that doesn’t mean they are. I have seen images that are the copyright of companies like Getty Images that are displayed under that filter and Getty Images are very litigious if you use one of their images without purchasing a license. Never assume – always check. As an aside, the same applies to ANY image you use in a book. If you didn’t take it or make it, you can’t use it without permission and you may (more than likely will) be sued for breach of copyright. Yes, we know that lots of people do it, but that doesn’t mean they won’t end up in court one day. Just remember the story of Wikipedia and the monkey that took a selfie.  Many publishers offer a design service for book covers. Some ask for payment up front, but others don’t, and some state that if the author takes back the publishing rights for the book then they have to purchase the right to use the cover image. So do make sure you know who owns the copyright for the cover – it may not be you. You may have to have a new cover designed if you want to self-publish the book or sign with another publisher. FYI, we make it clear in our contract that if we design a cover, or pay for a cover to be designed, then we own the copyright for it and it has to be purchased if the author wants to use it elsewhere. To be honest, we’d rather the author came up with their own cover design, but we know that isn’t going to happen very often. Not every author has a sister who is a talented artist. For some more tips on book cover design, try this blog. So, you have an edited and proofed book, you have a cover and it is sitting on a retail platform just waiting to be discovered by eager readers. What happens next? Find out in next week’s blog. If you have enjoyed this blog and found it informative and don't want to miss the next edition, you can sign up to our newsletter by clicking the button below. We'll even send you a free ebook for doing it. * To find out more about the artist who designed the cover for "A Commando's Story", Di Cubitt, you can visit her website.
Over the next few weeks we will be revisiting the series of blogs we posted early in 2021, about marketing for Indie Authors and authors published by smaller publishers. This is partly for the benefit of people who didn't see them the first time around, partly to remind people about some of the tools and techniques we suggested and partly to update the content to reflect lessons learnt. Whatever reason you have for visiting and reading the series, we hope you find something of interest to you. More importantly, we hope you find something that will help you to boost your book sales.  So, you’ve tried finding an agent and not been successful and you’ve submitted your book to medium sized publishers with similar results. Congratulations, you are now an “Indie author”. This is a club that is growing in size and probably has a global membership of over a million authors right now. You even have your own hashtag on Twitter: #indieauthor. With the arrival of the internet, whole new industries opened up that had never existed before. Amazon may be ubiquitous today, but it is sometimes easy to forget they didn’t even exist until 1994, just 27 years ago. "Congratulations, you are now an Indie Author." One of the things the internet brought was platforms that allowed authors to self-publish their books. Lulu was one of the first, established in 2002. It was a game changer for authors who couldn’t find a publisher. It also produced an exponential growth in the number of people describing themselves as authors, to the millions there are around the world today. Unfortunately, self-publishing is still sneered at by many and shunned by more than a few readers. The way some readers see it, a self-published book, for some reason, can’t possibly be good. This is no more true than saying that a bookshelf built in someone’s garden shed is going to collapse. Yes, it might, but at least try placing your book on it before you make that judgement. You are not Sheldon Cooper – you can embrace change.  "Indie" author Amanda Hocking Have you heard of Amanda Hocking? No? Well maybe you should be more adventurous in your reading. In 2010 she was un unknown and penniless author from Austen, Minnesota, USA, frustrated at not being able to find a publisher. She wanted to raise $300 so she could go to Chicago to a Muppets exhibition (she was a big fan). So, she self-published her book. After just a few weeks she had sold 150,000 copies, making $20,000. Several books later and she is now a millionaire. Not a single publishing house nor a single agent was involved. She did it her way. In 2019, L J Ross knocked J K Rowling off the top of the best seller charts with her self-published book and there are many other success stories for Indie Authors. OK, not every author can be an Amanda Hocking or L J Ross - but you can all dream. There are plenty of authors who make a respectable living by self-publishing. There are also thousands who will never make a penny out of it, but there are reasons for that and we’ll take a look at some of those later in this series of blogs.  One thing some authors discovered was that if they could publish their own books, they could also publish books for other authors. This has led to the growth in small publishing houses and not all of them offer good value for money. I’ll get onto that in a moment as well. But, for the moment, I’ll tell you that I’m going to talk about self-publishing and using small publishers as though they are the same thing because, for most purposes, they are. So, if they are the same, why should you use a small publisher? Here we get to the crux of the matter. A publisher (please excuse me for dropping the “small” prefix) will do things for you that you don’t know how to do, you don’t want to do, you don’t have the time to do, or they can do it better than you. The last time we redecorated our house we could have done it ourselves and saved a lot of money. Why didn’t we? Because our local painter and decorator could do a better job, made a lot less mess and we could carry on doing the things we really wanted to do, which wasn’t painting and decorating. Small publishers are the painters and decorators of the self-publishing world. "So, if they are all the same, why should you use a small publisher?" At the very least, a publisher should be doing the following:
I’ll be talking more about each of these in a moment.  If the publisher has done those things, they have earned their share of your book’s royalties. If they didn’t, why are you using them? All of those things the author can do for themselves. They aren’t all easy and some of them are very time consuming and/or tedious. Which is why some authors may prefer to get someone else to do them. There are many “publishers” out there that will ask you for money up front to do those things for you. Don’t pay them. Why not? Because once they have your money, they have no need to do anything else; in particular, bullet number 6. Marketing the book is the hardest and most time-consuming part of the process, but it is the point at which the author earns their income. "Because once they have your money, they have no need to do anything else." Unfortunately, in marketing you often have to spend money to make money – which is why these “pay up front” publishers don’t want to do that, because it would cost them money. If you pay a “publisher” £500 to do the first 5 things on that list, then there is no need for them to do the 6th and hardest. They have fulfilled their remit by getting your book onto Amazon, Lulu or Kobo. They have no need to spend hours, days and weeks of additional effort – and cash - to market your book. But if the publisher has done those first five things without you paying them, they will want some sort of return on their investment of time and they will only get that when your book sells. Proper publishers are hungry and they need to eat, so they will work hard to market your book so they can earn money from it, alongside you. Pay up front if you want – but don’t expect your book to become a best-seller. If you want to self-publish, then your starting point isn’t to upload your book onto KDP (or Lulu or Smashwords or Kobo etc). Your starting point is to learn how to do the 6 things in that list of bullet points above. In this blog we have previously talked about beta readers and they are your source of informed opinion on your book (informed because they are your audience). If you haven’t yet established your network of beta readers, then now is the time. Why is this a vital step? "Trying to market a bad book is like trying to market a bike with square wheels."  Well, people may buy your first book, but if it is the proverbial dog excrement, they will not come back for a second serving. Then there are the reviews. Not just on Amazon, but on Goodreads, Reddit and a whole host of other websites. Trying to market a bad book is like trying to market a bike with square wheels.. All authors get a few negative reviews, but if all you get are negative reviews you won’t sell any more books. And don’t try to fool people by getting friends and family to post good reviews for you. Amazon is wise to that and so are their customers. The reviews that carry the most weight are the ones posted by people who write a lot of reviews and that probably isn’t your Mum or your mate down the pub. But your beta readers have told you your book is great, so you don’t have to worry about future reviews too much. "The reviews that carry the most weight are the ones posted by people who write a lot of reviews."  Editing is about taking a good book and making it better. It may be that a paragraph needs to be shorter, sharper, punchier. It may be that the descriptions are a bit flat and need jazzing up. The pace of the narrative may be too slow, or too frantic, or the plot is too confusing. It may be that the characters are too shallow or unbelievable. You may even be committing the cardinal sin of doing too much telling and not enough showing. An editor looks at all those things and more and offers advice on how to make them better. But they won’t re-write the book for you. There are plenty of people offering paid editing services online. It is up to you whether or not you engage with them. But if you do, make sure you understand exactly what to expect from them. You can expect to pay at least £20 an hour for editing, perhaps £200 for one read of your book – and that’s the cheap end of the scale. Second readings are usually cheaper, perhaps half the cost of the first. There are on-line courses you can do to learn how to edit your work and some of them can be accessed for free, or quite cheaply. Learn how to edit and you can enhance your book no end. You still need good characters and a good plot, but you already know how to create those, don’t you? If you don’t, then again, some investment in learning will pay dividends in the long term. But you already knew that. You may think you are a good writer already and maybe you are, but everyone can improve with a little bit of help. If you don’t think you have anything to learn, why are you reading this blog? I would recommend this course from Future Learn in conjunction with The Open University – and its free. You can also sign up no matter where you are in the world. "everyone can improve with a little bit of help." Proofreading is the checking of text for spelling mistakes, poor grammar and typos. Basically, checking your English. It is something that is much easier to do than editing, but it never hurts to get a fresh pair of eyes to take a look at your work. I have spotted typos and mistakes in books published by the biggest names in the business – so no one is immune from missing things, no matter how many times they read them. You can find proof-readers who are quite cheap, offering their services on Fiverr.com  Formatting and uploading books is a matter of trial and error, but it is something that needs to be considered. I have bought books that have really not presented themselves very well because of poor formatting. A reader may have paid only 99p for your book, but they still want it to look like it cost £12.99. There is a whole blog that could be written about formatting and maybe we’ll write it one day, but the start point is to look at the books in your house and on your Kindle or other e-reader. What makes their layout pleasing – or what annoys you about them? If you do nothing else, take a look at what other publishers have done and copy it.  But fonts are especially important. There are fonts that are easy to read on the printed page; there are fonts that are easy to read on an e-reader; there are fonts that work on both and fonts that don’t work on either. Don’t spoil your book by using a font that looks pretty or quirky or different but doesn’t work on the media you have chosen for publishing. And do remember that a layout that works fine on an e-reader will probably need revising for a paperback. KDP can cause hours of frustration because of that. We recently published a book of poetry that we thought looked great using a particular font (it was a type of “cursive” script). It even looked good in the on-line previews. But when we published it, the very first buyer emailed to say his paperback copy was unreadable because of the script! We had to go back to the drawing board. Learn from our mistake. Uploading a book onto your chosen platform can take hours the first time you do it. But when you’ve finally beaten it into submission, the next time is a lot easier. There are help guides and often videos on most self-publishing platforms, but who wants to waste time reading/watching those? Actually, you do. Don’t work blind, use whatever help is available. One of our authors, Robert Cubitt, wrote a guide on how to use KDP, for some other author friends of his, and he has given us permission to let you use it. You can download it below. However, we accept no liability for it. You will notice that I haven’t mentioned book covers and their design. That is a subject for a separate blog as it comes under the heading of “marketing”. Which brings us to that very subject. Have you got a few weeks to spare? No, didn’t think so. We’ll do our best to break this complex subject down into bite sized, easily digestible chunks. It is probably the most important part of this series of blogs, because this is where you will actually get the financial return for all those weeks, months or even years you have expended writing your book and getting it to the stage where you actually need to market it. "It's probably the most important part of this series of blogs" Over the next few weeks this blog is going to cover social media marketing mainly, which is the cheapest form of marketing you can do. We will also tell you why paying money to people to Tweet your books is money wasted. But that is part of the story, so we won’t spoil it for you. We’ll also take a look at the 6Ps of marketing and how they relate to social media. Feel free to Google that before we meet again. If you have enjoyed this blog, ot found it informative, why not make sure you don't miss any of the rest of the series by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you an ebook for doing so. Just click the button below.
Disclaimer: This blog talks a lot about Amazon, but we are not connected to them in any way other than they sell our books. We are definitely not being paid to mention their name and we are not recommending Amazon. We are just recounting our experiences in the hope of passing on some of the knowledge we have gained.  As an author who sells through Amazon, you will know all about “sales ranking”. If your book sells, the ranking improves and people are encouraged to buy your book because other people have bought it. And if your ranking is low, people think your book isn’t any good because other people aren’t buying it - but that is flawed logic. Just because a book isn’t selling it doesn’t mean it isn’t any good. It may just mean that nobody knows about it (we blogged about advertising last week, so we’re not going to go back over old ground). But you won’t convince some readers that a book is good if it isn’t selling and there’s not much we can do to change that mindset.  We have been fortunate over recent weeks that several of our books have sold well and their sales rankings have improved exponentially. Instead of being in the 7 digit ranking range they are into the lower end of the 5 digit range – and are still climbing. That’s for their overall, ranking of course, not the category ranking. In some obscure categories its possible to be the No 1 bestseller just by selling a single copy. So that isn’t a good comparison for the purposes of this blog. But we believe our books’ rankings should be higher still and we also believe that the way Amazon calculates their rankings doesn’t take into account a whole raft of “sales” through their own platform. I’m referring to Kindle Unlimited (KU) pages read. While they may not be direct sales, the way that a book is sold, the reader is still paying to read the book through their KU subscription and the author is still getting an income from those page reads.  So, it is our contention that those page reads should be included in the calculations of sales rankings, which are an indication of the popularity of the book. KU page reads account for about two thirds of all our sales income (more for some individual titles). It is the equivalent of a lot of books sold. But Amazon doesn’t count them and there is no valid reason, as far as we can see, why they shouldn’t. In fact, it might actually be to Amazon’s benefit to include KU pages read, because the more popular a book, the more copies it sells and the more money Amazon will make from those sales. They are, effectively, depriving themselves of potential income with their current policy. I’ll use just one of our titles as an example of what we mean. "Our guestimate is that it would put the book into the top 1,000" But before we go on, a quick bit of jargon busting, for those of you who might need it. KENP means Kindle Edition Normalised Pages. It is the number of pages that Kindle Direct Publishing uses to calculate an author’s royalties for KU downloads. The more pages read in a book, the more the author gets paid. It is used to factor in the different font sizes and line spacings that authors use, which makes direct comparisons between the number of pages in a book problematic. We’re not sure how the KENP for a book is arrived at, but we suspect it may be based on character or word counts Mansplanation over, back to the blog.  Operation Absolom is the first book in Robert Cubitt’s “Carter’s Commandos” series. In July 2022 it sold 11 copies. This elevated it to around 30,000 in the Amazon rankings at the time. Although Operation Absolom is 296 pages long in paperback, its KENP is 437 pages. During July 2022, 19,215 KENP pages were read using KU. Divide 19,215 by 437 and it works out at 34 complete books. So, if 11 books sold gives Operation Absolom an average sales ranking of about 30,000, what would another 17 books give it if they were included in the figures? (BTW it actually peaked at around 10,000 - 7/7/22) Our guestimate is that it would easily put the book into the top 1,000, which makes the book look very popular indeed – as it is in reality. OK, we’re not talking J K Rowling or Lee Childs popular, but it is a lot more popular than a million other books on Amazon. "Perhaps weight of numbers might encourage a shift in policy" We could quote similar figures for the rest of the Carter’s Commandos series, because once people have read the first book it is clear they are then reading the rest of the series. But you get the idea from the one title we have used as an illustration. But it doesn’t look like that on Amazon. So, what can we do about it? We have already emailed Amazon to ask them why they won’t change the way they calculate their sales rankings. After all, they have all the data to hand and doing a new calculation that includes KENP would hardly be rocket science. This was their reply: “Sales rank is determined by a number of different inputs and may change over time. Amazon is constantly working to improve the quality of information available to our readers and authors. Please note that Sales Rank fluctuates every hour in line with customer demand and in relation to the demand for other books, both of which may vary based on factors such as popularity of new releases, seasonality, etc. Rankings reflect recent and historical activity, with recent activity weighted more heavily. Rankings are relative, so your sales rank can change even when your book's level of activity stays the same. For example, even if your book's level of activity stays the same, your rank may improve if other books see a decrease in activity, or your rank may drop if other books see an increase in activity. When we calculate Best Sellers Rank, we consider the entire history of a book's activity. Monitoring your book's Amazon sales rank may be helpful in gaining general insight into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and other initiatives to drive book activity, but it is not an accurate way to track your book's activity or compare its activity in relation to books in other categories. Thanks for taking time to share your thoughts about considering KENPC in sales ranking calculation. Customer feedback like yours is very important to helping us continue to improve our products and services. I appreciate your thoughts and will be sure to pass your suggestion along. Please refer to our Sales Ranking Help page for information regarding Sales Rank - https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A21KM4BNAD42EJ”  Amazon sales data - just the tip of the iceberg. We emailed back to them, saying that they were undermining their own reply. If tracking the effectiveness of marketing is an important use of sale rankings, then Amazon should surely be doing its best to maximise its utility by including KENP data, because that fluctuates in response to marketing activity as well
I also pointed out that by not including KENP, they were showing customers the tip of the iceberg, not the whole iceberg. They did reply once more, but only to provide platitudes. But if you are an author and your books are read using KU, then this is something that you should be concerned about as well. So why don’t you add your voice to ours and ask the same question? Perhaps weight of numbers might encourage a shift in policy Let’s face it, you have nothing to lose and your book’s sales ranking have everything to gain. But while we are on the subject of KU, would you like to help other Indie authors to maximise their income? I hope you said “yes” because it only takes a few seconds and will cost you nothing. When you get to the words “The End” in a book, there are often a few more pages left in it after that. They may be a preview of another book or an advert for other titles. It doesn’t matter. Just keep on swiping until you get to the actual end, so that the author gets paid for every last one of those KENPs. It may only be a few pennies (or cents) extra, but they add up. Even if the book wasn’t to your taste and you didn’t finish it, which is hardly the author’s fault, you can make sure they get full recompense for their work by swiping through to the end anyway. As I said, it costs you nothing but a few moments of your time. If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative (both we hope), be sure not to miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a FREE ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. Disclaimer: This blog talks a lot about Amazon, but we are not connected to them in any way other than that we use their platform sell our books. We are definitely not being paid to mention their name and nor are we recommending their services. We are just recounting our experiences in the hope of passing on some of the knowledge we have gained.  Here at Selfishgenie Publishing we know that it pays for small publishers and Indie authors to advertise. Not only do we know this, but we have the data to support our arguments. What we have also found, however, is that we can’t rely on some of the data that is provided to tell us if our advertisements are paying for themselves. Over the past 6 months we have been experimenting with our advertising tactics to see which give us the best results. Recently we have been focused on Amazon as the advertising platform of choice. But the first thing we noticed was that the metrics (measurements) provided by Amazon on their platform weren’t matching up with our actual sales. According to the report for one campaign, we sold x number of books, but according to our actual sales data we had sold yx copies, which was a considerably larger number (sorry to be so vague with the numbers, but that data is privileged information). This is an important difference, because had we believed Amazon’s numbers, we would have concluded that our advertising budget had been wasted. That is because of the ACOS. For those of you unfamiliar with ACOS, it is a calculation that Amazon does to compare the cost of the advert with the income Amazon believes the advert generated It means “advertising cost of sales”. Based on their figures, our ACOS was 198% of what we would get back in royalties as a result of placing the advert. In other words, if we had spent £2 on advertising we would only be getting back about £1 in royalties.  .And that does make it look like we had wasted our money. However, a quick click over to the various websites where we sell our books revealed that we had sold far more books than Amazon knew about – and that included sales through Amazon itself (BTW, when we say “sales” we also include Kindle Unlimited pages read. They account for about two thirds of our total revenue). When we divided the ACOS by the revenue that was actually generated, we got a far lower number, which demonstrated that our advertising campaign was justified in terms of its cost. In fact, for every £1 we spent we got over £5 back. Even after splitting that 50:50 with the author, everyone was making money. OK, Amazon doesn’t know how many books we have sold through other websites and we don’t know how many people have seen our books promoted on Amazon and then gone elsewhere to actually buy them. “Ah,” you might say, “so how do you know those sales were the result of your advertisement?” A fair question. So, why the discrepancy in data? The answer is that we know because the sales were for the same books as we had advertised, or they are part of the same series and there had been a sharp “up tick” in sales coincidental to the dates when the advertising campaign had been run. So, why the discrepancy in data? The first reason is that Amazon does its calculations based on “impressions” and “clicks”. First of all, Amazon Ads measures how many customers had the advertisement placed in front of them (the basis of their charging), either as a result of a search or as a “recommendation”. Then they measure how many of those customers clicked on the link in the advert to take a closer look at the book, and then they count the number of clicks that were made to actually buy (or download) the book. The first number was very high, the second number was lower and the final number was, unsurprisingly, lower still. But what Amazon doesn’t take into account is the psychological effect of the advertising process.  Oh, here we go, he’s wandering off into some metaphysical introspection now. No – I’m not. Please bear with me. Firstly, there is an old adage in advertising that says people have to see an advertisement 7 times before they respond to it. As with all such rules, it is a generalisation. Some people will respond the first time they see an advert, because they have a need for the product and now they now know how they can satisfy that need. Some people, on the other hand, may never respond because they have no need for that product, or because they are very happy with a similar product supplied by a competitor.  But this generalisation around ad campaigns is important, because the author has to to allow time for those 7 exposures to the ad to take place. In all our ads we have noticed that response was lowest at the beginning of the campaign and then increased as time went on, usually from around day 4, until it reached a plateau. We also noticed that sales were highest at the weekend (including Friday evenings), which suggests people buy more books then. So, it seems to be a good idea to time the ad so some of the exposures occur towards the end of the week, for maximum impact. A second reason is that the advert is for a product the reader may have already purchased, but the target is reminded that the same supplier has other products and they go and look at those instead. Eg they see an advert for Heinz tomato ketchup, they already have enough ketchup, but it reminds them they need Heinz baked beans and they go and buy those instead. We know absolutely this was what was happening with our books. We were making sales of titles other than those we were advertising. People had already bought Book 1 in our Carter’s Commando series, the book we were advertising, but they were reminded of the author’s name and went looking for other work by him and bought those books instead. The final part of the conundrum is that sales continued after the advertising campaign had ended. Why was that?  Partly the same as the reason above, the readers went and looked for other titles by the same author after having bought the one we advertised.
But part of it was that either the author’s name or the book’s title had been subconsciously planted in the reader’s memory, so that when they saw it pop up in search results later in the month (which we hadn’t paid for) they responded and bought the book. So, what did we learn by running these recent advertising campaigns:
Here endeth the lesson, Go in peace to enjoy the rest of your day. But if you are struggling to make sales, you may need to think about paying for some advertising. We know it costs money, but if your book sells, it will be a worthwhile investment. And if your book still doesn’t sell, you have to ask yourself why readers aren’t responding to it. But that is a whole different blog. If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative (Hopefully both), be sure not to miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. We'll even send you a FREE ebook for doing so. Just click the button below. This week our guest blogger takes a look at the vagaries of the English Language and how we ended up where we are. The views expressed in this blog are those of the blogger and don't necessarily represent the views of Selfishgenie Publishing.  One of my friends on Facebook, an Irish lady, posted this picture and asked an open question about who felt confident about the pronunciation of the product name (no, not Heinz - the other bit) . She was re-posting it from another Facebook page which is owned by an American on-line magazine. I was able to reply with the information that English place names that include the letters “cester” don’t actually pronounce the “ces” part, so the correct pronunciation is Wooster-sheer. The incorporation of “cester” into a place name means that it was founded by the Romans when they were in Britain and has its origins in “castra”, which is Latin for a camp. It is also the origin for place names that include “chester” as in Chester and Manchester. From that word we also get Doncaster and Lancaster. Incidentally, the “lan” part of Lancaster comes from the nearby River Lune (pronounced loon), but I’m guessing the people of the city didn’t fancy being known as the people from Looncaster.*  Chester - a city founded by the Romans The pronunciation of Worcestershire is problematical for three reasons. Firstly, there is the pronunciation of Worc, It looks as though it should be pronounced as work, but the c in cester is soft, which makes the pronunciation worse, both literally and figuratively. I’m guessing the people of Worcester and its parent county didn’t fancy living in worse-tur, so the pronunciation shifted to woos. Secondly the “shire” part is pronounced sheer when it is quite clearly spelt to rhyme with hire. But that’s the English language for you, full of anomalies such as that one. I’ll return to that a little later. The final reason for this pronunciation being problematical, and pedants will already be penning their e-mails to tell me so, is that it is a sweeping generalisation and can’t be universally applied. What about “Cirencester”? They will ask. The “cester” in that is pronounced, otherwise it would be siren-stir and not siren-sester, like sister but spelt with an e. But anyway, Gloucestershire is pronounced gloss–tur-sheer, Leicestershire is less-tur-sheer, Towcester is toaster and Alcester is all-stir.  This is part of the problem with English. It isn’t consistent with the application of its own rules. Especially the English that is spoken in the United Kingdom. Take “I before e except after c”. I think there is sufficient evidence to allow us to draw a veil over that one. In fact, there are far more words that don’t obey the rule than there are words that do. The saying itself isn’t even complete. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s 1880 “Rules for English Spelling” gives it as “i before e, except after c, or when sounded as "a," as in neighbour and weigh.” But there is insufficient evidence to support that, either. Despite Cobham being English and never having visited America, the use of his rule in schools started in America, not Britain. But there you go, rules are meant to be broken (actually they aren’t, but that’s a whole different blog). But there are a lot of words we don’t know how to pronounce, or which some Smart Alec decides we are pronouncing wrongly and who change it. Take the name of the warrior queen Boadicea, for example.  Actor Alex Kinston as Boadicea A long time ago, when I was growing up, she was universally referred to as Boadicea (Boa – d - seer). It is even engraved on her statue, which stands close to Westminster Bridge in London. In 1797 a British frigate was named HMS Boadicea, there was a passenger ship of the same name which was wrecked off the coast of Ireland in 1816 and there was a 1928 film entitled Boadicea. Yet somehow it was decided by someone that this was wrong and all of a sudden everyone started calling her Boudicca (Boo-dick-uh). Why and on what authority? I blame actor Alex Kingston, who starred in the TV drama Boudicca, Warrior Queen, in 2003.  Roman historian Tacitus; AD56 to AD 120 The only reason we know of this woman’s existence (that’s Boadicea, not Alex Kingston) is because of the Roman historian Tacitus, who recorded much of Rome’s history of the first century AD. However, he wasn’t born until AD 56 and never set foot in Britain. Given that Boadicea (I shall insist on using that name) died in AD 61, Tacitus would only have been 6 or 7 years old and could only have heard of the warrior queen second hand from his father, who had served in Britain 3 times, including during the rebellion for which she is famous. He would have heard about her in Latin, the Roman language and not the language of Britain, whose native people were Celts. It is from Tacitus that we get the spelling and pronunciation of Boadicea, not Boudicca. As the Celts didn’t have a written language at this time, we have no idea how her name would have been spelt or how the Celts would have pronounced it. So, it would appear, someone has taken it upon himself (or herself) to decide how the Celts would have pronounced it, with no regard for the lack of historical fact. They may look to Welsh, Scottish or Irish pronunciations, but that would be wrong, because those nations would have rendered the name into their languages from Latin as it was the only written source available.  If you doubt this, then you have only to look at how Welsh and Gaelic speakers render modern words into their own language. The Welsh for “television” is teledu and the Irish is teilifís. Given that these words were created in modern times they could just have been accepted without translation, much as the French use l’weekend, but no, they had to be given a linguistic twist to make them “Celtic”. Could the same not have been done with the name of Boadicea? Is the use of the name Boudicca not just us pandering to first century Celtic chauvinism? Or maybe even to late 20th century Celtic chauvinism. What is my evidence for all that? She wasn’t actually a Queen at all so would not have been known widely outside of her own lands. She was the wife, and subsequently widow, of Prasutagus who was a client King of the Romans in an obscure and quite remote part of eastern England, a small part of the county we now call Norfolk. Her rebellion was short lived, lasting only a few weeks, and while she wrought havoc during that time she died ingloriously, crushed by the Roman legions. She wouldn’t have been admired, even by her own people, after that defeat. In fact, given the reprisals visited on the natives by the Romans after the rebellion, it is more likely that her name would have been more cursed than celebrated. As I said, the only reason we know about her at all is because of a Roman historian who wrote her name in Latin and it was Boadicea.  But back to words and their pronunciation. How do you pronounce “bow”? If you have thought about it you will have come up with two different pronunciations. Pronunciation (1) rhymes with “go” and pronunciation (2) rhymes with “cow”. You only know which is correct when you put other words alongside it to make it clear which bow you are talking about. So, you would need to know that the mother tied the ribbon into a pretty bow for her daughter’s hair, or that the man bent over in a deep bow of respect for the king. English is almost unique in having words that can be both nouns and verbs, depending on how we use them. No other language does that. This is why we get a noun such as bow, which can mean a knot or a weapon, and also a verb, to bow. We also have run, which is a verb and also a noun – a place for running as in chicken run and walk, a verb which means to move at a particular pace but which can also be a noun – a good walk. There are many others. How do we teach this to our children? Actually we don’t. They appear to learn it for themselves. No one is sure how, but they seem to pick it up instinctively. However, in many ways English is also a simple language. Take the definite article “the” as in the chair, the table etc. That’s it. That’s all we have. It’s gender neutral and doesn’t change between the subject and object of a sentence. German has der, die, das, den and dem for the same thing and the French have le, la and les and also, frequently, l’. In German there are 7 different versions of “you” depending on gender and familiarity with the person being addressed. The French have at least 2, tu and vous (I’m not a linguist so I am happy to be corrected on that). The Japanese have 7 forms of “thank you” starting with the simple arigato and moving up though levels of formality until the speaker is lying prostrate, face down on the ground. Just joking, but it isn’t far from the truth. The Japanese language is very big on formality, as are many others. English, however, seems to be much less worried about formality these days.  Much of this is because our language isn’t pure. 2,000 years ago the residents of these islands would all have spoken the Celtic language(s), because the Romans’ only successful invasion wasn’t until AD42 (get ready for a big anniversary party in 20 years’ time). But they wouldn’t all have spoken in the same dialect. We know this because Welsh, one of the ancient Celtic languages, is different from Gaelic, which is spoken in both Scotland and Ireland but has differences even between them. They are all different from Manx, spoken on the Isle of Man., Then there’s Cornish and Breton. It wasn’t really the Romans that brought us Latin, it was more to do with the clergy, who used Latin to communicate between themselves and taught it to the children of the aristocracy and the wealthy, who also used it as a way of communicating with their peers throughout Europe. Many of our words have a Latin origin, even though a lot of them came via other European languages. European philosophers loved the Ancient Greeks and quite a lot of our words have their language as their origin because of that, especially those relating to medicine and science.  About 1,500 years ago our ancestors started to speak Anglo-Saxon, brought with us (or perhaps to us, depending on your ancestry) by the invaders who filled the power vacuum created when the Romans went home. This is still the basis for our language but only scholars of mediaeval languages would be able to understand what a Saxon warrior was saying, were one to rise from the dead in today’s Britain. Mixed in with our Anglo-Saxon is Norse, brought to us by the Danes and Norwegians between 1,300 to 1,000 years ago, then sprinkle in some Norman French which arrived 950 years ago. Thanks to the Plantagenet’s we get more French, the real thing, which was brought in about 850 years ago and from that recipe the language we now call English began to emerge about 700 years ago. English wasn’t even the official language of the Royal Court until the time of Richard II, who died in 1400 (Trivia - he also introduced the fork into England as an implement of cutlery). With a bit of difficulty, we would be able to understand the dying words of Watt Tyler, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, who died in 1381. As he was beheaded his last word was probably “argh”, but you get the idea.  The eastern influence Even though English was a fully formed language by the 1500s, it didn’t stop changing even after that. In the 19th century we started to adopt words from much further east. If you are in the habit of wearing pyjamas when you are in your bungalow, you are using two words that have their roots in India. From that it is unsurprising that so much of our language is confusing. Each new addition brought new words, new ways of saying things and new ways of spelling, much of which wasn’t written down because the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes didn’t have a written language at the time of their arrival. It was monks who wrote things down and they did it in Latin, not Anglo-Saxon. When the monks started to create a written version of the common languages they had to invent new letters, such as æ because there was no equivalent sound in Latin. They even had to invent the letters J and W because these weren’t in the original Latin alphabet. That’s right; You couldn’t go to a J D Wetherspoon’s pub in early Anglo Saxon times, it would have been I D Utherspoon’s.  The grumpy looking Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) In fact English spelling as we know it didn’t come in until Samuel Johnson published the first English dictionary in 1755. Up until then people spelt things pretty much as they felt like it; even their own names. There are, allegedly, at least three different versions of the spelling of Shakespeare’s name, all in his own handwriting (scholars now dispute this, but they always did like to spoil a good story). Even after the publication of Johnson’s dictionary it took some time for spelling to become standardised and to take on their modern forms. American spelling didn’t start to be standardised until 1828 when Noah Webster published his “American Dictionary of the English Language”. This is the one that led to the Americans starting to leave the u out of words like colour and to put z where it had always been perfectly adequate for an s to be. Webster felt it necessary to try to simplify the language for the benefit of the wide variety of immigrants who were arriving in their droves from Europe.  Just a note for my American readers (and many British too, because they make the same mistake). When you see a sign like this one it isn’t pronounced Yee Oldee. The Y isn’t a Y, it is an obsolete letter called a thorne and is pronounced th. Also, you don’t pronounce the e in Olde (or shoppe for that matter). So, it’s just plain “The Old”. Boring, I know. Robert Burchfield, who edited the Oxford English Dictionary for 30 years up until 1986, once caused quite a stir by saying that the British and American forms of English were drifting apart so rapidly that in 200 years’ time it was possible that we would no longer be able to understand one another. However, he was speaking in the pre-internet age (remember that?) and I think it is far more likely that we will soon all be speaking American English. Already I’m being bullied by software that provides an annoying red wiggly line under anything that it thinks should have a z in it when I think it should be an s, or when I spell “colour” with a u. How long before the weaker willed amongst us start to give in to this automated intimidation? Anyway, here’s one person who is happy to educate Americans on how to pronounce Worcestershire and who will always spell colour with a u. * The words “loon” and “lunatic” are derived from the French “la lune” meaning the moon and allude to the alleged strange behaviour of some people and animals at the time of the full moon. If you enjoyed this blog or found it informative, be sure not to miss future editions by signing up to our newsletter. Just click on the button below and we'll even send you an ebook of your choice for doing it. Would you like to be a guest blogger for Selfishgenie Publishing? Just email us with an outline of your blog. And you can also have a free ebook if we use your submission. Our email address is enquiries@selfishgenie.com
Once again we turn our blog page over to a guest blogger. The views expressed are those of the blog's author and don't necessarily represent the views of Selfishgenie Publishing  Have you noticed how books are all starting to conform to a pattern these days? After reading the start of a few books quite recently I rejected them, but it was only after I rejected them that I started to realise that the reason I rejected them was because they weren’t conforming to the pattern. Therefore, I wasn’t prepared to carry on reading them. Which was most unfair on the authors who had invested so much time in writing them. So, what is the pattern? It’s the habit many authors now have of hitting the reader between the eyes on page one of the book, with some sort of action scene, before dialling down the action to properly introduce the characters and develop the plot. They then pick up where the action left off and continue the story in a more linear fashion. I have to plead guilty with regards to my own books.  It doesn’t just apply to books that are action focused. Romances, too, sometimes start in the middle before returning to the beginning. So, has this always been the way books were written? Going back deep into history, to the start of my own reading, I remember that stories happened in a predictable order. There was the beginning, where the characters were introduced and the starting point of the story was established, then a middle, where the plot was developed, then an end, where the climax was reached and everyone lived happily ever after. This allowed the author to develop their characters before launching them into their adventures. Who could imagine “Pride and Prejudice” being a success if we didn’t know all about Elizabeth Bennet’s personality from the very start.  If you think about the fairy stories of childhood, they always conformed to the beginning, middle and end pattern. We don’t first encounter Snow White breaking into the Seven Dwarves’ house, then go back to find out that she was sent out with the huntsman to be murdered on the orders of her wicked stepmother. Similarly, we don’t first encounter Cinderella running away from the ball, losing her glass slipper on the way, then go back to the kitchen to find out she is being bullied by her wicked stepmother and the ugly sisters.. Of course, those stories are for children and a child’s unsophisticated mind couldn’t follow a story told any other way. But what we learn as children tends to stay with us for life. As we grow up the stories still follow the beginning, middle and end paradigm until we reach adulthood. Then mayhem ensues.  The problem with this traditional style of storytelling, of course, is that it takes time to introduce characters, explain who they are and what they are doing. I remember having been bored silly by “The Warden”, a novel by Anthony Trollope and considered to be a classic. The reason I was trying to read it was because it was a set book for my English exams and I was supposed to be learning how to use language and how to tell a story properly. Today Trollope’s book might never find a publisher, because it takes so long to get going (no great loss if you ask me). The same could be said of many other books that are regarded as classics. So why this change in the approach to storytelling? Well, literary agents are partly to blame (or are they?). When an author wishes to submit a book to an agent in order to try to get a publishing deal, the first thing they do is go onto the agent’s website and read the submission guidelines. These are invariably the same. Submit no more than the first 10,000 words or the first 3 chapters. If the agent likes what they read, they will ask for more. If not, they won’t. Even when it comes to publishers who accept submissions direct from authors, the word limit is usually still applied.  So that’s it guys and gals. If you can’t grab the agent’s attention in those 10,000 or so words your book will be rejected. So, in order to deal with that the author tries to inject some action into the first thousand words in the hope that the agent reads on. The result is that the middle of the book, or at least part of it, gets stuck in before the beginning. However, is it really the agent’s fault? After all, isn’t the author making a rather large assumption about what the agent wants to read and is tailoring their book on the basis of that assumption. Maybe the agent actually wants to see how the characters are developed and how the plot unfolds. Maybe that is why so many authors receive rejection letters. Maybe we are making our submissions based on false assumptions. If you are an agent or publisher reading this, perhaps you’d like to comment.  Then there is Amazon. Their “look inside” feature gives the purchaser the opportunity to read a couple of thousand words of a book before they purchase it. This is to match the experience of the “browser”; the reader in the bookshop or library who has the time to spare to actually read the first few pages of the book before they decide whether or not to borrow or buy it. So, again, the author may set out to grab the reader’s attention so that they don’t put the book back down again. But again are we, the authors, usurping the process by making the assumption that the reader won’t borrow or buy our book if we don’t hit them between the eyes on the very first page. It is said that the first line of a book must be an attention grabber. That’s fair enough, but that doesn’t mean that the author then has to launch into climactic action before the reader even knows who the characters are.  As part of the research for this blog (yes, I do research) I read the ‘look inside’ portion of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”. This, of course, is reckoned to be another classic. But based on what I read, I wouldn’t buy it. To be sure, Melville’s use of language is beautiful, but in the opening pages of the book not a lot happens. The reader isn’t even told that a whale is involved. We don't even find out who Ishmael is or what he has to do with the story (not a lot, as it turns out). So, is it therefore not the reader’s fault that the whole nature of storytelling has changed? We expect instant gratification. We want the action to start on Page One, and if it doesn’t we put the book down and move on.  Thinking about this made me think about films (movies) and the way they now tell their stories. We are used to James Bond films, for example, where Bond is always in mortal combat with an enemy in the opening scenes of the film, well before the title music starts up. Other films also use this technique. So, maybe, in our minds, we have started to think that is how our stories should be told. We, too, are putting the action in before the metaphorical title music. So, when an author goes back to the traditional beginning, middle and end format for writing, we think it a little bit odd. Is this what guided my decisions to reject certain books? Or is it just me? I may have been rejecting masterpieces, simply because I didn’t have the patience to let the author tell the story properly. I have had the same conversation with my wife when new TV dramas start up. It’s a bit boring, she’ll say, and my reply will be that we have to establish who everyone is first and how they connect together.  Again, thinking of TV crime shows in particular, they often open up with a dead body and it takes the rest of the story to find out who the dead person really was, and all their little quirks and foibles which led them to being bumped off. Along the way we also find out about the police officers who are investigating the death, but not until after the body is found. Would I still watch the programme if it unfolded any other way? I can hardly complain that a character is underdeveloped if I won’t give the author time to develop him or her. I can’t complain about the plot being difficult to follow if I don’t give the author time to explain what is happening. This is particularly so when it comes to back story. It is like trying to tell the story of World War II without first telling the reader who the Nazis were. Will I be changing the way I write my own stories as a result of what I have deduced? I don’t know. I rather like hitting the reader between the eyes on Page One. I don’t do it in every book I have written, but I have to admit to doing it in the majority of them. Judge for yourselves whether it is the right technique. Just click on the “books” tab at the top of this page to find out more. If you enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, be sure not miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. Just click on the button below. We'll even let you choose a FREE ebook for doing it. 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Once again we are turning our blog page over to a guest blogger. All the views expressed in this blog are those of the blogger and are not necessarily representative of the views of Selfishgenie Publishing.  Why do it? Why put yourself through all the trials and tribulations of writing a novel, searching for an agent, then possibly having to do all the work to self-publish if you can’t attract an agent? I have applied some thought to this and have come up with the following list of reasons. It isn’t exhaustive, so please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments below the blog. 1. You like writing. I know that this sounds obvious, but I have actually met authors who have told me that they love being an author but hate all the writing that goes with it. Sorry, that will never work out. You can test yourself on this. If, suddenly, an hour of your time were to come free, which would you rather do (A) watch something on TV or (B) sit down and try to write something. If the answer isn’t (B) then you are never going to be an author.  2. You have a genuine talent. When you first decide to write you may not know if you have the talent for it or not. Even when you have written your first book and shown it to friends and family you still can’t be sure, because friends and family often want to be kind and so they say kind things about your work. But if you do have a talent then it is vital to express it, or frustration is the only possible outcome. The first review on Amazon (other book selling sites are available) that is submitted by a stranger will tell you if you have a talent or not. But there are two different forms of talent that make a good author. The first is a talent for story telling – and it doesn’t have to manifest itself in the written form. If you are the sort of person who is able to make up stories for the entertainment of others, you have this talent and you are halfway to becoming a successful author. The second talent is the actual writing part. Being able to construct sentences that grab the reader’s attention and provide them with the emotional input they crave. Being literate in the grammatical sense helps, but that can be sorted out by a proof reader or editor. 3. You love reading. Reading and writing go hand in hand. All real authors start off as avid readers. The best books inspire us to have a go, while the worst books inspire us to try to do better ourselves.  4. You live somewhere where there are harsh winters. I’m serious. It’s far easier to sit indoors and write a thousand words if the sun isn’t shining outside. Even small outdoor distractions, such as tidying the garden, get in the way of writing. If you live in the sort of latitudes where it is dark for 18 hours out of 24 (or even longer) then so much the better. 5. You have something you want to say. We all have opinions, but some have stronger feelings about things than others. Writing them down in the form of a novel allows you to imbue your character with your opinions while also telling a story. However, there is a downside to this. You may be alienating all those potential readers who disagree with your opinions. While you may believe that you are right, they have the right to disagree with you.  6. You want to expose something that needs exposing. Making an issue part of your plot allows you to expose a problem or a scandal. If your readers are intelligent (they probably are, otherwise they wouldn’t be reading books, they’d be playing computer games) they will see where the fiction ends and where the reality starts. You can often reach a far larger audience with a novel than with a polemic. To Kill A Mockingbird did far more to expose racism in the USA than any number of learned treatises. 7. You want to entertain people. We can’t all sing or dance or play the piano, but if you can write a decent story, you can be an entertainer. Story telling as a form of entertainment goes back far further in history than music or dance. 8. You have to get the stories out of your head. So many good ideas for stories, but they are no good stuck inside your head. They just nag and nag at you. So, tell the stories and stop them nagging you.  9. It’s cathartic. Expressing yourself artistically (yes, that’s what authors are doing) makes you feel better. Getting your demons out of your head and onto the paper prevents them from praying on your mind and threatening your sanity. 10. You like telling lies. Authors tell lies for a living. The best of them are able to make you believe their lies so well that they can transport you to a whole world that they have created out of their lies. Tolkein, Pratchett, Douglas Adam, Richard Adams, the list goes on but the one thing these greats have in common is that their worlds didn’t exist, but they made us believe in them anyway. They could sell snow to an Eskimo. And One Reason Why You Shouldn’t Become An Author.  1. You want to make lots of money. Sadly, you probably won’t. Even if you sell quite a lot of copies, your publisher, agent, printer, retail outlet etc will all take a cut. Typically the author only gets about 10% of the gross income from sales and then the Inland Revenue want a cut of that. For a £9.99 paperback ($11.50 approx) the author won’t get much more than 80 pence. To make the top 100 best seller lists you have to sell at least 100,000 copies, which means the author might get £80,000 before tax. But the majority of authors, probably 90% of them, will never sell more than 1,000 copes, so earnings expectations are very low. According to The Guardian most authors make less than £600 a year. Given that you have probably invested about 1,000 hours in writing your book, that isn’t a very good return. It’s certainly below the hourly rate for the so-called Living Wage. A meagre 1.7% of traditionally published authors and 0.7% of self-published authors make in excess of £70,000 ($100,000 approx). The article is a bit old now, but the fundamentals of publishing haven’t changed since it was written. The big money from books comes from film and TV rights. If your book attracts that attention then the sky is the limit, but again, that won’t happen for about 90% of authors. How many authors are out there writing away and how many of them will hit the big time? Well, accurate figures aren’t available because most data is based on sales and if no sales are forthcoming you won’t be counted. Then there are the thousands of authors who are still working away in the bedrooms, kitchens or sheds to complete their first manuscript and can’t be counted because they haven’t yet broken cover. But put it this way, over a million books are uploaded onto Amazon each year, the vast majority by by self-published authors and then you have to add on those that are published by small, on-line publishers. Whereas the total output of the big publishing houses, who dominate the market, is between 1,000 and 2,000 books per year of all types (UK figures). Even with the backing and marketing budget of a major publishing house most of those books will sell less than the magic 100,000 copies needed to make it onto a best seller list. In Susanne Collins’s The Hunger Games the supporters always say to the combatants, “may the odds always be in your favour”. The truth is that in book publishing, the odds are always stacked against success.  Ignore all those claims made by some authors of being “Number 1” on Amazon’s best seller list for such-and-such a category. The way Amazon works you can make it to number one with the sale of half a dozen copies in a day, even less in some obscure categories. You’ll only be there for a day, perhaps even for an hour, but that’s long enough to do a “screen save” to share on Facebook or Twitter. if you doubt me, re-read Reason 10 above. Many writers will never make anything from the sale of their books. That doesn’t mean that they are bad books. How would anyone know if they haven’t read a copy? No, the authors don’t make any money because readers like to stick with the tried and tested. They may read a book that is recommended to them by a friend or relative, but they don’t often go seeking out new authors for themselves. The friend or relative probably bought their copy because it was reviewed in a newspaper or magazine, channels that are securely stitched up by the big publishers. Hey – who said that the world was fair? Show me the contract! That is why authors are always asking for reviews. So if you, as a reader, do find a new author and, if you like their book, please consider sharing your discovery by writing a review. So, if you are going to become an author, do it for the love of writing because it is probably the only reward you will ever get. And for those very few of you who will one day hit the big time – don’t forget the little people! If you have enjoyed this blog and you want to be sure of not missing the next one, just sign up for our newsletter. We promise not to spam you and we'll even let you choose a free ebook for doing it. Just click on the button below. And if you would like to be a guest blogger for us, just send us your blog idea. You can find our email address here.
This week we have lent our blog to the famous advice columnist (also know as an Agony Aunt), Auntie Vera*. Read on to discover what advice she offers the lovelorn, the confused and the downright bewildered.  Dear Auntie Vera, I love dancing and like going out dancing on a Saturday night, but my boyfriend just wants to stay in and watch Match Of The Day. What should I do? Signed, Dancing Queen. Dear Dancing Queen, Get a new boyfriend.  Dear Auntie Vera, When we first started going out, my boyfriend used to dress smartly, talk to me about my interests and pay attention to my needs. Now we’ve been going out for a while he just wears trakkie bottoms and a filthy tee shirt, talks only about football and ignores me unless he wants sex. What should I do? Signed, Peeved Dear Peeved, Get a new boyfriend. Dear Auntie Vera, My girlfriend has just dumped me because I wear trakkie bottoms and a filthy tee shirt, talk only about football and she says I ignore her except for when I want sex. What is her problem? Signed, Gooner. Dear Gooner, Look in a mirror. Would you date you? Dear Auntie Vera, I have often thought that I might make a good agony aunt. I like people, I’m a good listener, I have a lot of life experience and people listen to what I have to say. What do you think? Signed, Auntie Velma. Dear Auntie Velma, you sound like a crashing bore. You will probably do well but stay off my patch or you’ll get a visit from the boys!  Dear Auntie Vera, I’ve just met this fabulous footballer and I think I love him, but I’m not sure I can trust him. He has a bit of a reputation and I’m worried that if I marry him he might cheat on me. What should I do? Signed, Football Flirt Dear Football Flirt, get a pre-nup, marry him and then wait for him to do the inevitable. You’ll get half his money in the divorce settlement. Dear Auntie Vera, I’m a very rich footballer and I can have any girl I want. Indeed, I’ve already had most of them, but I’ve just met this gorgeous girl and I’m worried that she’s only after me for my money. What should I do? Signed, Fickle Footballer. Dear Fickle Footballer, You’re arrogant, overbearing and you have the personality of a crustacean. Of course she isn’t after you for your money. She loves the real you. Marry her. Agree to whatever she asks for in the pre-nup.  Dear Auntie Vera, I post lots of things about myself on social media, including photos and most of my personal issues, my likes and dislikes and my political and religious views. I really like the publicity so much. But that isn’t my problem. My problem is that the newspapers keep writing stories about me as though they know me. Do you think my phone is being bugged? Signed On-line Celebrity. Dear On-line Celebrity. Are you really that stupid? Dear Auntie Vera, Whenever I go on social media I get bombarded with advertising. But the puzzling thing is that the advertisements are all for products I have done searches on, or I have posted comments on in other people’s posts. I’ve even shared some of them. I did a quiz about 1970s pop bands and then got advertisements for products aimed at people in their 60s. It's almost as if the advertisers know me. Is this a coincidence?  Signed Social Media Junkie Dear Social media Junkie. Are you really that stupid? Dear Auntie Vera, The world is going to rack and ruin. What should we do? Signed Desperate. Dear Desperate, Go to Tenerife instead.  Dear Auntie Vera, I am an author plagued by feelings of doubt about my talent. I don’t think my work is good enough, despite the fact that lots of readers buy my books and post nice reviews about them. What should I do? Signed, Doubting Wordsmith. Dear Doubting Wordsmith, The short answer is “grow a pair”, but I doubt that this will satisfy you. So, here’s the psychobabble answer. There is nothing unusual about doubting our own abilities. In fact, it is healthy to do so as we then try to do better. But don’t let doubt cloud your belief in yourself. Let others be the judge of your talent, as they will see it through different eyes. Only if the readers say you have no talent should you re-think your life choices. Dear Auntie Vera I have just signed a book deal. How much am I allowed to brag about it on social media? Signed Proud Author Dear Proud Author. Brag about it as much as you like. Nobody of social media gives a you-know-what anyway and it is better than boring your family and friends with the news.  Dear Auntie Vera, I’m a member of a writing community that uses the hashtag #WritingCommunity on social media. They all say how much they support Indie authors, but very few seem to buy any of the work by them. Is it all talk? Signed Puzzled Tweep Dear Puzzled Tweep. Yes it is all talk. Everything you see on social media is all talk. That’s why social media exists. Social Media "communities" give the illusion of providing support or taking action, while not actually having to do anything. But you can be different and take action by buying the books of other Indie authors. But you probably won’t because that requires you to take action too and if you wanted to do that you wouldn’t be asking me questions to which you already know the answers.  Dear Auntie Vera, No matter which political party I vote for, the same politicians seem to get elected. I don’t mean they are from the same party; I mean they just do as little as the previous lot. Is it me? Signed Frustrated Voter. Dear Frustrated Voter. No, it isn’t you. To quote Emma Goldman “If voting changed anything, it would have been made illegal”. Politicians stand for election because they have failed in just about every other walk of life. If they were clever, they’d be working in commerce or industry earning twice as much money. If they had real compassion, they’d be working for a charity on half the money and making a real difference to people’s lives. There is a famous line from George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman”. “Those who can, do. Those who can’t do, teach.”** I’ll add to that with my personal view, “Those who can’t teach become politicians”. The people they are elected to represent have no further say in what the politicians do, at least until the next election, when they probably won’t vote him (or her) out of office because they could never vote for “the other lot” (regardless who the other lot are). This is a consequence of tribal behaviour and and the need to feel that we belong somewhere. This is why people also support failing football teams and talentless celebrities. So, we keep getting governments made up of people who lack any real talent, who rely on their manipulative Civil Servants to do most of the work, who want to please their financial backers more than they want to solve the nation’s problems and who cling onto power by making it seem they are doing something when whatever they are actually doing will change very little and which will benefit their financial backers the most. This applies to all the political parties, not just to the one that is in power at the moment. It probably also applies in all countries. Please remember all that the next time you step into a polling booth. But whatever you do, don’t stop voting. One day you may vote for that rarest of beasts, a politician that really wants to make a difference, instead of one that just says they want to make a difference. * Auntie Vera is not a real person and all of the above is intended as satire. Please do not take either the questions or the answers too seriously. However, satire is based on real life and usually carries its own lessons within it. ** Any teachers offended by this quote should complain to George Bernard Shaw, not to Selfishgenie Publishing. We happen to think teachers are great and do a wonderful job. Is that enough grovelling yet? If you have enjoyed this blog and don't want to miss future editions, then sign up to our newsletter. We promise not to spam you and we'll even let you choose a free ebook for doing it (T&C apply). Just click the button below.
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