So how did this happen?  Quite frankly I have no idea, but here is what I did and maybe you can make sense of it.

Publishing something on the Kindle platform through Amazon is relatively easy from a technical point of view.  So long as you have the right tools and some basic knowledge of how the system works you can create good quality e-books yourself without having to go through any costly publishing companies.  This sounds great, but of course the cost of generating the e-book is not the end of it.  Assuming you wrote the book well enough in the first place that people will enjoy actually reading it, you still have the basic challenge of letting people know that it exists so they can buy it in the first place.

Without a budget, social networking is your friend here.  Get the message out to everyone you know, and if you’re lucky enough of them will be interested – and have Kindles – and buy a copy.  But that’s often where it stops.  Nobody else hears about you and your book stops selling.

Reducing the price can help encourage sales, but for most copyright works Amazon have a minimum price at which they will let you list your book.  This is fine if people are already buying it, but even £1.95 is more than some people are willing to pay for a book that might be utter tripe.  This is where the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program comes in.  If you enrol your book with KDP Select not only is it eligible to be ‘borrowed’ under Amazon’s library system but you can list your book as free for a set period.

Giving your book away for nothing may seem like a strange way to generate actual paying sales, but on Amazon it kind of makes sense.  Go and buy a book there and the bottom of your screen is lined with pictures of other books under the heading “People who bought this also bought…”.  If you can get your book out to a number of people then every time someone searches for a book there is the possibility that yours may end up in the list at the bottom of the screen.  Having seen it they might just click on it.

So I tried it.

And the picture above shows what happened.  For no reason that I’ve been able to fathom, about 36 hours into a 48 hour promotion Through the Square Window hit number 9 on the Bestsellers (free) list.  Amazing.

Since the promotion has ended my sales have dropped again, but to a far higher level than they were at before it.  This was definitely a success that I would consider using again, although you don’t want to do it too often I would imagine, or people will know to wait until the next time before buying it for free.

G

It’s not often I wake up on a Sunday morning and immediately feel so incensed that I have to write to my MP, but that’s what happened today when an article in the Guardian caught my eye that I could hardly believe.

The government – a government that claims to be in favour of supporting the development of scientific excellence in the UK – plans to close the Forensic Science Service.

This government funded centre has not only helped to bring hundreds of criminal cases over the years to a successful conclusion, but the research they have done has developed new techniques that will continue to improve the criminal justice process for years to come.  It is impossible to say where forensic science in the UK – and beyond – would be if this team had not been set up, but it is certain that there would be many criminal convictions, both past and yet to come, that would be unsuccessful without their knowledge and skills.  Is it really worth it to close them to save the relatively small amount of investment it takes to run this laboratory?  Of course not.

Link to the article in The Guardian

Some time ago a previous government (another Tory one) decided to close and privatise a number of centres of engineering and quality excellence that were around the UK in the name of cost-saving.  These laboratories developed new techniques for standardisation of electrical and mechanical measurement, solved some of the most complex mathematical problems of their time, became the baseline for countries around the world to use for standards reference, and developed new techniques for improving safety in both domestic and industrial equipment.  They developed quality systems that are now used worldwide, and laid the foundations for software development in safety-critical systems such as aeroplanes and medical products.  Did they make a profit?  Of course not, especially if taken in isolation, but their value to UK Ltd. was immeasurable.

That government decided that because on paper these laboratories did not – and could not – show a profit they should be privatised and made to run as part of other businesses.  The sites were closed and the land sold off, and the laboratories that a few years earlier had been the envy of the world became simply small units in the back offices of companies driven by profits and shareholders.  Now, almost twenty years later, almost none of those laboratories still exist.  The skills have migrated out of the UK, the business that once was theirs now goes to France, Russia, or China, and people remember the good old days with a wistful thought and a “whatever happened to…..?”

We still have scientific excellence in this country, and the FSS is an example of this.  Do we really want to see that go the same way as its predecessors?

G

I get asked this question a lot, often by boys aged about ten when I’m setting up the PA for a school play, but occasionally by slightly braver than average adults who see me concentrating hard as I say “Testing… one… two… one… two…” into a mic and they prompt me with “three?” in case I have forgotten what came next.  So to anyone interested in this age-old question, let me tell you now that the answer is a technical one.  Sound engineers in general can count far higher than ‘two’ (many can get well into the double figures), but there is simply no need for them to do so when performing a sound check as those three words ‘Testing’, ‘One’, and ‘Two’ cover all the things you need to know when setting up a PA.

Let me explain.

When setting up a PA (that’s ‘Public Address’ if you don’t know the acronym, shorthand for a bunch of microphones, a mixing desk, an amplifier, and some scary big speakers) you need to know how it sounds in the space you have available.  A small room might resonate at certain frequencies giving a booming muddy sound, and a building with solid flat walls might give nasty echoes.  An open field might sound really dead and a concert hall might have so much echo you can still hear the applause dying away from the last group who played there.  All of these things get in the way of the basic job of a PA and sound engineer, which is simply to make sure everything is heard and heard clearly.

As well as listening to the room you also have to listen to the PA itself.  Is it loud enough?  Is it too loud?  Does it give that familiar rising whistle of feedback that means a microphone is too close to a speaker and that the audience are about to dive for cover?  All of these things can be guessed at or approximated when the PA is being set up, but it is only when you finally turn everything on and push some sound through it that you find out if your guesses were correct.

“Testing… testing… one… two… one… two…”

Yes, but why the same words every time?  Why not recite “Mary had a little lamb,” or even “Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more…”?  Surely that would have the same effect?

Actually, no it wouldn’t.  The key lies in the sounds that make up the words and how a PA system reacts to them.  The words are the acoustic equivalent of the typed phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” that uses every letter on the keyboard; they cover everything the sound engineer needs to know in one easy-to-say phrase.

“One” starts with a nice “wa” sound that contains a lot of mid range and helps to highlight any boomy frequencies that might be there.  ”Two” starts with a hard “T” sound that can often cause popping in badly positioned (or cheap) microphones and can sometimes start a PA system that is close to the edge ringing with feedback.  It also finishes with a nice “ooo” sound that – if you say it right – can pick up on bass-boom, that dreaded rumble that fills a room with mush and drowns out the vocals.  Finally, “Testing” has a good double-s sound in the middle that can emphasise something called sibilance, the over exaggeration of the “s” sound that can make vocals hissy or scratchy.

That is why the sound engineer is concentrating so hard when he says his small piece to camera.  He’s not trying to remember what comes next, he’s trying to hear what the PA sounds like at a range of different frequencies and under various conditions.

An ordinary life in an ordinary town is all that Samantha ever wanted, but when her neighbour tries to kill her and she is rescued by a woman who claims to be a vampire she starts to see that there is more going on around her than she had ever thought possible. With a killer hunting her down and unable to trust anyone but her closest friends, Samantha is forced to face the possibility that she lives in a world where vampires are real, and where one might already have changed her life forever.

Those of you that have been following what I do under the banner of The Lacuna Works will know that AB started life as a script for a film that I hoped to get made some time ago.  We had a good line on the funding and we even went as far as sorting out a cast and some of the locations, but then – as is so often the way – the funding disappeared and we were left high and dry.  Actually it was a bit more complicated than that, but  I’m not going to write about that here.  Email me if you want more info.

Anyway, with the film on hold whilst new funding was sought the story behind AB was one I really liked and so I decided to turn it into a novel.  I did some planning, drew up some notes, then last November I got started on the actual writing.  I finished it over Christmas then spent January editing it and tweaking it, until by the time it was finished I had a novel in front of me that I was pretty happy with.

AB is a vampire story, but a vampire story with a difference.  The vampires in AB do not sparkle, they are not demonic or supernatural, and they are not after your brains (ok, that last one might be zombies).  The AB vampires are powerful, sexy,  intelligent, quick, and… living right amongst us.  The house down the road that never seems to be occupied but where the garden is kept tidy?  The lock-up at the end of the road with the carefully maintained bolts and hinges that you never see open?  The shop on the high street that keeps hours so strange they cannot possibly ever see any customers?  All towns have their secrets, but some secrets are more secret than others.

Buy AB for the Kindle only £1.96

AB- Abnocto Bibere is available on Kindle now, but you do not need a Kindle to read Kindle books.  Pretty much any smartphone or tablet can get the free Kindle app and if you do that you can be reading AB in just a few minutes.

I hope you enjoy it.

G

• Change the air filter
• Change the fuel filter
• Change the oil and oil filter
• Replace the thermostat

When I came home from dropping the kids off at school I popped the bonnet to start getting ready and realised that the thermostat on the engine looks nothing like the one I bought. Great. I must have picked the wrong one. So I went back and checked that I had the one I’d ordered, then when that was right I went back to the Halfords site and checked the number, then looked around a load of other places. EVERYTHING shows the same part listed, and that part is the wrong shape.  Hmmm.

The one I ordered that does not fit

I then phoneed my local motor factors who have a trade database. They showed three different ones for my car - none of them like the one I have on my table – so I start looking at pictures and eventually work out which one it is.  The trouble is it’s pretty much four times the price of the one I bought:  Price of original (wrong) part… £24 inc VAT.  Price quoted for correct part… £75+VAT.

The one on my car looks like this

I’ve managed to find it cheaper now (around £45) but all online and with a week or so to wait. Not helpful for a job today.  At that point I gave up with the thermostat and started on the other stuff.

The air filter and the fuel filter were relatively straightforward, but the oil filter took an invented tool made from a pair of pincers, an adjustable spanner and a long steel bar to get it to shift.  As for the drain plug, well that never came out at all.  Fortunately there is a temperature sensor down there that I could get out and drained it through that.

Planned time… 30-60 mins.  Actual time… 2 1/2 hours (and the thermostat is still not done).

Ho hum.

I work in two very different worlds, one arty and creative where the unusual is usual, and one corporate with strict rules for everything. Things that are perfectly normal
in one may get me fired in the other, and yet I want my web published content to be viewable in both places. So how do you judge what is acceptable content to put on a website when the target audience is so diverse?

The best solution that I have come up with so far is to avoid the problem by splitting my content across multiple sites. My generic, personal, and hopefully non-offensive material is on this one; my photography is on grahamguyphoto.com which includes nudes that might upset some cultures or corporate policies; my business information is on thelacunaworks.co.uk. That way there is less chance of someone visiting one accidentally stumbling onto the other. They can even block one if they like (although I’d rather they didn’t). It’s not an ideal solution, but it is the best I can think of right now.

I’m sure that some people would rather I stuck to the boring, the inherently ‘inoffensive’, but, and here’s the rub, that in itself would offend me.

I have been sitting at my keyboard for some time now trying to think of a suitable way to start this article.  All the obvious ‘great man’ openers seem wrong somehow, and will be done far better by people who actually knew him, so it is left to the rest of us to comment on what the death – the very early death – of a man who indirectly affected so much means to us.

He was a businessman, someone who understood how to grow something small into something huge.  But whilst other people in similar positions have grown technology businesses based on features and toolsets, or by tracking supply and demand, Steve Jobs realised that the way to stand out was to be creative.  He included art into his designs, and made technology something that was approachable.  From the early Apple II through the first Mac (now known as the Classic) and onto the latest iThis and iThat, the Apple brand has taken technology and turned it from being something you hid away in the corner to something you proudly displayed in the middle of your living room.  It is as if whilst all the other companies were vying to see who could cram the fastest processor into the biggest boxes, Apple started by designing something that looked fun, sleek, or futuristic, and then fitted the tech into the available space.

But the Steve Jobs effect did not stop at the edge of the Apple campus.  As they started to produce sleeker and more desirable equipment, other companies followed suit, and soon technology companies everywhere realised that the art of the product was as important as well.  Whether you have an iPhone or an Android, a PC or a Mac, the ‘lifestyling’ of technology was led by Apple, as they realised that whilst what people needed was a powerful tool, what they wanted was something that looked more like a designer accessory than an industrial workhorse.

Steve Jobs changed the way that the world looked at technology, and it will never be the same again.  We can only wonder what he would have achieved with longer to develop his ideas and see them to fruition.

When I published Through the Square Window on the Kindle platform earlier in the year that was quite something.  I moved from being one of those people who talked about writing a book to being one of those people who had actually written a book.  And I had published it.  Ok, so the fanfare around the launch was mostly a bit of a buzz on Twitter and a few shouts on Facebook, and the posters on the tube and busses were noticeable entirely by their absence, but it was a launch of sorts and people started buying the book.  I was a published author, and people who weren’t me seemed to like what I had written.

But fan as I am of the whole eBook concept, there is something very traditional about a physical paperback that is missing in a download.  Now I’m a firm believer that the way things are going it won’t be long before the majority of commercial fiction is distributed in electronic format, but we are not there yet, and we seem to be even further from a time when it is possible to hand out copies of your eBook when you meet your friends or your clients.  The paperback is not quite dead.

So when I got the chance I worked out how to self-publish (in the UK, and to actually make a profit, which was a bit of a challenge I can tell you), and set the wheels in motion to get Through the Square Window available in paperback form. And that is what arrived today.

The funny thing is that until I held it in my hands I had no idea really how big a book it was.  Had I written something that was actually quite short, or was it about right for the genre?  Actually as it turns out it is bang on the money; at 18mm thick in standard form factor it sits nicely in the hand, and looks worth a read.  It is an actual book.

And the other main thing that separates physical books from their e-counterparts?  Every physical book published in the UK has a copy lodged in the British Library, in physical form for at least 40 years, and then in scanned archive form theoretically forever.

It is very weird to think that if someone in two hundred years wants to read my book they will now be able to do so.

Now that’s publishing.

Graham

ISBN: 978-0-956990-0-9

The first time you work with new actors, new crew, and new locations there is always a certain amount of trepidation.  Will everything go as planned?  Will everyone get on?  Will everyone deliver performances at least as good as they did in the rehearsal?  You can plan and prepare as much as you like, but on the day a film is not about how many pages of notes you have made, but how people who have often never met before can work together and create the film that the director envisaged.  But from the moment we met up yesterday morning I knew that there was nothing to worry about, and as the day went on things just got better and better.  Everyone on set delivered more than I could possibly have hoped, and so I can say with no doubt whatsoever that this is going to be a great film.

If you’ve never been involved in a project like this you probably have no idea the level of intensity there can be on a film set.  Actors are pushed into emotional situations, often completely out of context as the scenes are rarely filmed in anything approaching the right order.  Crew are faced with near impossible timelines as the director tries to get ‘just one more scene’ done in a day.  And so, particularly on a small production like this one, the ability of everyone to get along and work together without getting on each other’s nerves is almost as important as their technical ability.  I have been on film sets where this was not the case, and I can tell you it is not a good experience.

But the cast and crew we have for Isabelle are amazing.  A relaxed and happy set is an efficient and creative set, and this lot are all of the above.  We have worked together for just one whole day and one bit of a rehearsal, and yet we are already starting to feel like old friends.  Yesterday we were shooting across two physically separated locations, the first of which was in the middle of nowhere.  We were there a lot longer than I had expected and so by the time we got back for lunch it was already well into the afternoon.  We had a number of scenes planned that we were unable to shoot because of various administrative reasons, and so the schedule became somewhat fluid as things were changed around to fit.  And yet there was no stress at all.  It was one of the most relaxed sets I have ever seen.  And that was down to the general awsomeness of everyone involved.

So here’s a big THANK YOU to everyone on the crew and in the cast, and here’s to more days like that one as we continue to film over the summer.  I make films because I enjoy doing it, and yesterday reminded me why I enjoy it so much.

Graham

Now if you know me at all you know that generally I have a very good idea how my shoots are going to go.  I plan locations, props, costumes, and any post-production that is required long before packing the kit into the car and heading out to meet up with the model.  That way I get no surprises on the shoot itself, and the model – especially if it is someone I have’t worked with before – knows what to expect.  But this time I had no clue.  So I chucked a couple of outfits in a rucksack along with the camera equipment and headed down to Poole.

Once the first meeting was finished I headed out to where I was to meet Rachael, and then the exploration began.  I had a map of the area, but although that told me where the green areas were and where the footpaths crossed them it made no mention of where you could park to get to anywhere useful.  So we drove around for a bit and eventually came across this strange little wood next to a layby and did a number of photos there.  Once we had exhausted the possibilities there we got back into the car and drove around a bit more, eventually finding (by guesswork rather than genius navigation, I might add) a route up to Badbury Rings, where we did a load more pictures.

And – on this occasion at least – ‘unplanned’ really worked.  Rachael was fantastic to work with and we got some really great shots.  She put up with my randomly driving around Dorset, and shot after shot was a winner.  You can see the results on my photography site here. *

So the moral to this tale?  Don’t be scared of the unplanned or the unexpected.  If an opportunity arises don’t overthink it.  Just get your camera out and start photographing.  It may come out better than you think.

G

* Please note – these links lead to sites that are not what would generally be considered ‘safe for work’.  You have been warned.