Déjà Vu

Acknowledgements for the First Edition

The original manuscript was read by my intrepid friends Daniel Graaskov, Karen Jensen, Alex Mears, and Arie van der Lugt. Their comments vastly improved the final book. Further constructive feedback came via the Psychology Department Book Club at the University of Exeter (Rachael Carrick and Kate Fenwick were particularly helpful). Thanks also to Rachel Day for permission to use her copyrighted word ‘tit-full’. And not forgetting my editor at the UKA Press, the redoubtable Aliya Whiteley, who helped transform the manuscript from the bloated pug of yesterday to the svelte whippet of today (any errors of breeding, such as an extra ear or a penchant for chair legs, must be left at my door).

For specialist assistance, I must thank Paul Johns, who helped out with some of the medical conditions and procedures described in these pages. Where errors exist, I am the goat. With respect to the time machine, David Gardiner checked my calculations, rubbished them, and redid them from scratch.

My partner, Britta, has gone beyond the call of duty in giving me time and space to write this book since its inception, many moons ago, when the year 2003 was still in the future. I dedicate this book, and everything else, to her.

And In The End

An excerpt from my blog, dated 20th August, 2010. Read the original

What follows is a very personal post, for which I do not apologise. It is likely to be the last post I make to this blog (though perhaps not; see below). I hope that it will not be sentimental. That said, it will be honest. I will write about something that has been very important to me since I was a wee scamp.

A long time ago—when I was an undergraduate, fifteen years back—I read an interview with Stephen King in which he described the moment his novel, Carrie, was picked up by New England Library. He was living in a trailer and had so little money that the telephone was disconnected. The original news about the publication of Carrie came via telegram. King wanted to buy a gift for his wife. He went into town and found the only thing he could he imagine she wanted: a hair dryer.

Fifteen years ago, reading the interview with King, I already had two novels under my belt. They were awful. Since then, I’ve written four more. These last—Déjà Vu, Proper Job, Flashback and The Amber Rooms—are quite good. Déjà Vu has been published and the other three have been with my agent, John Jarrold, for some years. Four, I think. A long time.

Someone wrote—King again, I think—that a writer is a person who will write no matter what. In other words, if you lock them up in a cell without pen or pencil, they’ll write on the wall in their own blood. I didn’t believe that when I read it and I don’t believe it now. Even Stephen King comes to a point when the blood dries up. Writers are people. We—they—would want to play football if they were footballers, not sit on the subs bench; they would want to have a workshop, tools, and customers if they made furniture for a living; writers want to be read.

Fifteen years is a fair crack of the whip. As of now, I am no longer a writer of fiction.

For my part, I cannot write fiction these days. There are too many words unpublished behind me. To write a novel is to commit years of your life. Nobody wants to commit them in vain. They will do this, of course, in the beginning, with a certain faith that if the end product is any good, then it will be published. Right now I do believe the books I’ve written are good. I believe that sections, elements, moments of them are very good. My agent is an excellent one and he would not be wasting his time with me otherwise. The reality is that the publishing industry is small. Only so many doors are open to a writer of science fiction thrillers, and, when you’ve been round the doors once, it’s the same people opening them next time.

What is to be gained by retirement? Why not take a break? These are questions that my agent—who has been very supportive of my decision—has asked.

Since writing the first draft of The Amber Rooms, I’ve felt a deepening disillusionment with the craft of writing. This disillusionment is almost certainly superficial. Much as I hate to write this, the feeling is probably based on something akin to jealousy. It is not jealousy per se. Rather, it is the feeling expressed by the sentence ‘I could do better than that’. Not an easy thing to admit. But with each instance of shoddy, clichéd, or generally below par published writing that I read, my faith that my own long years of effort will ever count for something (that is: readers) diminishes to the point where I am barely picking up a book. The process has become painful. As a child, books were like fuel, crack cocaine, and world travelling rolled into one. My writing has taken me to the point where I am in danger of poisoning the well from which, it seems, the greater part of my mind has sprung. Given a choice between the two—literature and the stuff on my hard drive—I choose literature.

My fifteen-year crack at a writing career has had other consequences. We all know what it’s like to be served at a supermarket by a sulky teenager who might well work in Lidl but, you know: it isn’t what she does. Her mind is on greater things. So too has my mind been on greater things. Not all of it, not all the time, and I’ve tried not to be too rude. But many sacrifices have been made by me and the people who love me in order that I have the time and space to write. There is a cost to this; they deserve the benefit of seeing that the cost was not wasted and, as far as I can see, this is not going to happen.

This post is not meant to be a dollop of ‘poor Ian’ schmaltz. I had enough of that in one glance when I bought a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook around the turn of the century. As I gave it to the middle-aged, friendly cashier in Exeter Waterstone’s, she sighed at the cover and said, ‘Aw, you want to be a writer,’ as though I were Grandpa announcing my wish to take tiffin with the Maharajah. The empirical evidence suggests that very few people who write fiction seriously ever ‘make it’ in the accepted sense. We only hear the stories of the successes. But in these days of Web 2.0, and blogs, the process is more public.

A colleague said something to me a couple of weeks back. We had read psychology at the same university, though his was the year below mine. This colleague is now a world-renowned researcher and someone I look up to. I remarked that I was glad he had made such a success of it. He looked at me, blinked, and said, ‘Well, I’m surprised it turned out like this. You were always the golden boy.’

That startled me. Then I recalled sitting in Dave Earle’s advanced statistics class and skimming over page after page of equations, barely taking them in, because I didn’t really do psychology. I was a writer. Meanwhile, there were hard-working friends who had not made it onto the MSc or, if they had, could not afford to take up a place. I was sitting pretty with a full-time competitive scholarship keeping me in pen and ink, not to mention another scholarship lined up to carry me through my PhD—and as the Chi-square contrasts flowed before my eyes, I was more concerned with the opening paragraph to Déjà Vu. In my defence, I did work hard on the book, and the book was good.

Several years later, however, it’s time to do psychology.

So now we come to the end of this post, and this blog. It is likely that I’ll continue to tinker with my extant manuscripts (not least to incorporate some notes kindly provided by writer friends). When these are complete, I’ll make them available as print-on-demand books, probably via Lulu, and then archive the site.

Stephen King made me want to be a writer. Or, rather, his book The Stand had such an effect on me that the half-formed idea of writing books for living became what I did for the next fifteen or so years. When asked what I wanted to do as an adult, I would, instead of shrugging in a morose teenagery way, say, ‘A writer,’ and the response would be a nod of approval; no doubt it doesn’t hurt to encourage this ambition in a young man, particularly when good English is such a transferrable skill. The model of Stephen King was the one I aspired to: he wrote a thousand words a day, rain or shine, and produced vivid, good quality, character-driven stories that I loved. At the end of each book, he would write his name, his location (usually Maine, USA), and dates between which he had written the book. I looked at those dates and thought ‘That’s what I’ll be doing’ and I relished the prospect of those years.

In 2005, I read a short, handsome review of Déjà Vu in The Guardian as my friends in the Rashleigh pub at Charlestown harbour slapped me on the back. The theme of the evening was that this review marked a milestone on the way to some great, literary city. Outwardly, I wholeheartedly agreed. But I also knew there was a good chance that I was holding the high-water mark of what would serve as a my literary career. It did; that felt OK at the time, and, in the end, it’s still OK.

Thanks, Aliya, the UKA Press, UK Authors, Ken, Neil, the Exeter Writers’ Group, Debra, Scott, and, of course, my agent John Jarrold. John has been tireless and faultless in his efforts to get my work under the right noses. A top man. And not to forget my partner, Britta: she put up with all manner of consequences while I spent time creating alternative realities. I never did get her that hair dryer.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

An excerpt from a piece I wrote for Scott Pack’s blog, 18th March, 2011. Read the original

There was something familiar about the headline. I did a double-take.

It read:

I spat out my tea in a brown fountain.

Finally! I thought. I can afford a new laptop—one that isn’t covered in tea.

And then it hit me. This was another Hocking. Not exactly another Ian Hocking—like that nice American estate agent who emails occasionally—but Amanda Hocking, a young woman in Minnesota who, it turns out, is making a healthy living from selling her ebooks directly through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Desperately, I reached for a pen, set about tapping it against my teeth, and thought about what all this could mean.

I’ve retired from fiction writing, partly because only one of my four novels has been published—and published in a special sense at that. Upon its release in 2005, if you walked into your local Waterstone’s the staff member you spoke to could order a copy as long as he or she knew about the special red phone underneath the till. It showed up on Amazon, which was great, and was listed there as Spanish, which was not so. Impishly, Amazon would never reply to emails about the error, and still don’t. The kindly reviews were nice for me to read but had no impact on sales because the supply was almost non-existent. You’d have to be one of those people who firmly decide that you wanted the book and go to Amazon and ignore the warning that the book was in Spanish and buy it without ever reading a sample. Basically, you’d have to be either Mum or Dad or my girlfriend.

So I’m looking at this Amanda Hocking headline. Flecks of tea are moving down the screen of my laptop like the raw Matrix. The half-formed idea in my head—that I can make a book available and I don’t need to have a publisher—becomes about three-quarters formed. My audience is going to be limited to a few million Kindle customers, but that’s like saying my writing is limited by the alphabet; it’s enough, and nobody is going to tell me that only Random House can use the ‘Q’.

Amazon has the Kindle and they are selling them cheap. The Kindle store is very large. People who own a Kindle—like your humble correspondent—tend to be delighted with them, even though they’re a bit wonky. I can, in moments, download a Mark Twain, or buy the latest Jonathan Franzen. The Kindle store contains upwards of 700,000 books and the chances of finding an author you care about are good.

Then you have Apple. Their iBooks store has potential. The iPad isn’t wonky but the iBooks store is. The chances of finding a tell-all biography of Steve Jobs are slim. On the flip side, the chances of finding Winnie the Pooh are great.

You also have Barnes and Noble, and various other outlets and channels.

Right now, if you’re going to place your eggs in just one basket, Amazon looks like a good bet. They have relationships (strained, but there) with publishers and no other manufacturer can yet beat their Kindle for price. Steve Jobs said that 2011 will be the year of the iPad 2, but the jury is still eating bad hotel food over whether it’s possible to enjoy long-form fiction on the device. I’d say the iPad isn’t suited to the job.

The iBooks system is a tricky one. To get your book in there, you need a publisher. Lulu.com will do the job. These guys will add a small surcharge to your book and let you publish it for free—which is fine until you try to produce an ebook in iBooks’ ‘epub’ format. This format seems a mite less stable that Kindle’s ‘mobi’ and needs to pass through an automatic validation service to verify that it’s a well-formed epub file. Trouble is, I couldn’t get Apple Pages to export my novel in an epub format that would validate, and the ebook will never appear on iBooks until that happens. I’m still scratching my head about it. Right now, iBooks is the wild west.

The other advantage that Amazon has is a system called ‘Direct Kindle Publishing’. Cryptically, this is a system that allows you to publish—to the Kindle—but directly. It has some tolerably exciting aspects. First, it’s worldwide. Second, you can designate up to 70% of the cover price as a royalty. Compare this to the rate you’d receive through a traditional publisher. Alas, it’s not straightforward to publish a book for free using this service. (This had been my original plan following my retirement.) Third, it won’t matter that editors, agents, et al. say to you ‘It’s brilliant, moving, and wonderfully written but, gee, my lapdog didn’t do the shit dance when I acted out the first scene and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this game it’s that SCHNOOKINS IS NEVER WRONG.’

Too bitter?

Anyway, it won’t matter. Your ebook will just appear.

The Kindle publishing platform accepts multiple formats. My advice is to take this advice. If you’re not scared to get at the HTML of the book itself, it will pay dividends because you won’t end up with a trailing carriage return, WingDing, or otherwise bizarre formatting thingy that you can’t get rid of.

One more tip: Use the Kindle emulator available from Amazon. This was recommended to me by m’writerly colleague Michael Stephen Fuchs—another technothriller author—and it’s invaluable. You’ll be able to produce versions of your book and see what the reading experience of it will be for a reader.

Now, the cover.

This is what separates the Cubs from the Scouts—at least in my opinion. Anyone who thinks the jacket isn’t important can probably point to the phenomenal success of ebooks with appalling covers, and they’d be half-right. Today, however, I’d say the cover is still important.

How much should your ebook, or any ebook cost? For inspiration about this, I look to two things: (i) the Apple IOS ‘app store’, where prices are quite low compared to the traditional rate for software (anything over a tenner needs to be special); and (ii) my own feeling that £6.99 is all well and good for a physical paperback but far too expensive for an ebook. I’ve settled for £1.71, which is Amazon’s conversion of the US price of $2.99.

I published the book a couple of weeks back and I’ve sold five copies. A small number? That’s five people who, three weeks ago, hadn’t read my book and were never going to while it pootled around the publishing houses of the world waiting for Schnookins to do the shit dance. Am I bitter? No, not really. The only publishers I know well are very nice people, but that doesn’t help Bob in Idaho get hold of my book when the mood takes him.

The thing is this: There is no print run. In six months’ time, whether five or fifty or five thousand units have been sold, it will still be available to millions of Kindle users in an instant. It will probably be there the year after that; and maybe for several years. By 2020, I might even have figured out how to get the bloody thing onto iBooks.

At the end of this edition of Déjà Vu, I’ve written:

Given that Déjà Vu is now out and about, there is a very good chance that Flashback—which has been in a holding pattern for several years—will finally be published this summer. I’ll let Amanda Hocking keep the millions of readers; me, I’ll settle for a few dozen and the occasional email from Bob in Idaho.