Google Book Search is a fine thing
I first heard about Google Book Search early last year, when I interviewed Professor Dan Atkins from the School of Information at the University of Michigan, during a conference in Auckland. Atkins spoke about the partnership between Google and leading research libraries (including the University of Michigan), which set out to digitise up to 10 million volumes over the next six years. He did his best to assuage the largely tertiary and library audience’s fears over copyright breaches relating to educational works.
But enough about the big picture; back to my shameless self-promotion. In late 2004, my first novel Liquidambar won a competition organised by PABD and UKA Press in the UK. This is the only reason the book is today available in hard copy (exclusively online for the time being). Publication was the prize. After seven years spent writing and editing this novel, I’d reached the end of my tether with the ‘old world’ publishing industry. Having successively signed up with two relatively high-profile literary agents in the US, and after numerous attempts to lure publishers there, in the UK and here in New Zealand to buy my book with largely frustrating results, one thing became apparent: few publishing industry professional are willing to read unsolicited works any more, let alone take the risk of publishing non-mainstream books via the traditional route. Liquidambar is neither an experimental novel nor did I set out to write an airport blockbuster. But I remain convinced that it’s original and that a substantial readership exists for it.
Hence my decision to enter the PABD/UKA “Search For A Great Read (SFAGR)” competition.
Liquidambar was shortlisted, and eventually won. My good friend and fellow Krakenista Richard Cooper also had his novel, All My Own Work, shortlisted. We had read each other’s books and I honestly thought his to be a worthy winner — I still do — but, in the interim, having been heavily involved in the later stages of the saga, I’m sure Richard is pleased his book didn’t win the SFAGR.
The acquisitions editor at the co-organising publisher, UKA Press, worked with me to ready my manuscript for publication, and I was naïve enough to believe that the end of my writing troubles were nigh: surely a mainstream publisher worth its salt would be interested in a prize-winning, professionally edited novel for which the cover art (owned by me) and pre-press files had been prepared at someone else’s expense. Publishing costs would be substantially reduced, and there had already been a certain amount of marketing, national radio and press around SFAGR both locally and internationally (including a mean-spirited piece in the Sunday Star-Times, that didn’t waste a word on Liquidambar’s literary merits or, indeed, the lack of them, but instead, in a sublime piece of serendipity that would have tickled its hack protagonist Typo Blod, managed to misquote me and misspell his name).
If I couldn’t interest a publisher in my book, perhaps I could at least sway some literary agents to do a bit of work in exchange for their 15/20 percent… To date, however, nada.
As it turns out, literary competitions are ten-a-penny. The Guardian’s books section noted at the time: “…the literary world is unable to go a week without being overwhelmed by the compulsion to give someone, somewhere a prize”. The literary establishment, on the other hand, have been overwhelmed only by the compulsion not to read my book. And, how can you get onto a major long-lists, let alone a shortlist, if your book is still languishing in a publisher slush-pile somewhere?
Last October, I decided to register Liquidambar with what was then Google Print (later to become Google Book Search), a service that promised to scan and index pages and make them available to internet users via a new function embedded in the Google search engine. Unfortunately, a file-naming error (damn and blast those impossibly long ISBNs) has delayed the book’s acceptance to Amazon UK’s very similar ‘Search Inside’ programme, with which I also registered last October.
The Google Book Search service is still in beta, but it’s already a powerful tool — for authors, publishers and internet users alike. You only see a “snippet” view of each work, not the whole book, thus negating widely publicised concerns over copyright and lost-sales.
The great thing about it is that you have a chance of attracting readers who may otherwise never have stumbled across your page at Amazon, through closely targeted searches. If, for example, you were eccentric enough to search on the words “Typo Blod” in Google Book Search, not only would you find my book at the top of the result list, it would be the only hit. Mind you, why anybody would be weird enough to use those search terms is anybody’s guess, but a quick look at your own website’s search statistics will provide ample evidence that there are lots of weirdos out there.
Far more sensible searches, however, including some of the distinctive titles of Edward Hopper’s paintings (each chapter in Liquidambar is named after a well-known Hopper work), also return Liquidambar very highly. The titles, “Tables For Ladies”, “Shakespeare At Dusk” and “Compartment C, Car 293” (with or without the comma) each return Liquidambar at the top of Google Books’ search list. Of course, if you merely search on “Edward Hopper” you’d have to dig a lot deeper — but that’s only fair; mine isn’t a book about Hopper, but about his works.
So how does any of this help a struggling novelist? Well, as I’ve said, authors of self-published or print-on-demand books have an uphill struggle getting their work noticed — either by readers or by the industry. Hopper fans interested enough in their favourite painting to search for a book about it might find that one set in ‘Hopperworld’ tugs on their purse-strings. Suddenly, Book Search becomes a much more powerful tool. Sure, my book costs £11.00 from Amazon UK and, by the time you’ve added freight to that you’ll be the better part of 20 quid poorer. But bundle your order with a couple of CDs, a DVD or, um… a Weightwatchers 8976U Glass Body Monitoring Precision Electronic Scale, and it starts to sound more cost-effective.
It may be a coincidence (or even an error) but since Liquidambar has been on Google Book Search, its “sales rank” on Amazon UK has leapt from 920,158 on 3 February to 232,593 today. Between February and December of 2005, it languished somewhere between the 1,000,000 and the 800,000 mark. To put all this firmly into perspective, my favourite author Russell Hoban’s latest book Linger Awhile, from the Bloomsbury Harry Potter stable, is sitting at 7242, and Dan Browne’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code is at 37.
Liquidambar has been on the Amazon UK site for well over a year. Those of my friends who care about such things regularly quiz me, “So, how’s the book selling?” and I’m sure they think I’m just being cagey but I really wish I could tell them. It honestly isn’t as easy as it sounds. So, before calling me up in the hope I’ll shout you lunch at Antoine’s to celebrate my new-found status as a “bestselling novelist” (ha!), there are a few things you ought to know:
1. PABD, the “publisher” (although that term isn’t suited to the world of print-on-demand, I don’t know what else to call it) of Liquidambar, has so far accounted for just a handful of copies sold through the trade. At one time, PABD was also selling the book directly from its own site, but since it stopped doing so it has failed to link my page to Amazon UK. I’ve received only two royalty statements from PABD, and they were so vague that they put a new slant on the term “creative accounting”. A group of four PABD authors, including myself, are now taking them to task over their shonky practices — if necessary, publicly.
2. Amazon UK’s sales rank shows only a book’s position relative to other books in the online store. There might be a plausible explanation for Liquidambar’s sudden leap up its sales ranks, but the only one I can think of would be the sudden deletion of over 600,000 titles from Amazon’s database.
3. It’s proven virtually impossible to persuade anyone to review my book on its own merits. Although Kathy Hunter at Leaf Salon was keen, and Art News had a copy of it (with its art-related content in mind), to date, the only detailed review that has appeared, other than those written by allies and compatriots at Amazon, is this thought-provoking, if not entirely positive, piece by Andrew Hook at Infinity Plus in the UK. Oh well. As Ricky Gervais commented in the January issue of Q magazine as part of his interview with Coldplay’s Chris Martin, the only way to avoid the “difficult second album” syndrome is to make sure that your first album is crap… At least this reviewer put some thought into it and had taken the trouble to read some of my other fiction.
4. A review copy sent to the Guardian when it started reviewing print-on-demand books was met with silence, and attempts by both Richard Cooper in the UK (who’s kindly been acting as an “unpaid agent” — by my calculations, 15 percent of nothing is still nothing), and myself to cajole the paper into responding, using Terry Gilliam-like tactics, resulted in the literary equivalent of tumbleweed borne on a cold, desert wind. When finally Mrs Ian McEwan, Annalena McAfee, the Guardian reviews editor, did respond, her letter to me was addressed to “Auckland, Australia”. We’re planning to buy her a map for her birthday.
4. In spite of the fact that it was part of the SFAGR prize, Liquidambar is still not available for sale via Amazon.com, 16 months later. This, according to PABD, is because the pre-press file supplied to the US printer was corrupt. Curiously, nobody informed either PABD or myself of this minor detail. The file I supplied to PABD was just fine, as it had been professionally ‘flight-checked’ by Digital River in Auckland.
Liquidambar is currently with a reader from the New Zealand branch of a multinational publisher. But until I see a royalty statement that shows some accurate Amazon UK sales figures, it seems I’ll have to resort to old-fashioned methods of promoting it.
Wanna buy a book?
But enough about the big picture; back to my shameless self-promotion. In late 2004, my first novel Liquidambar won a competition organised by PABD and UKA Press in the UK. This is the only reason the book is today available in hard copy (exclusively online for the time being). Publication was the prize. After seven years spent writing and editing this novel, I’d reached the end of my tether with the ‘old world’ publishing industry. Having successively signed up with two relatively high-profile literary agents in the US, and after numerous attempts to lure publishers there, in the UK and here in New Zealand to buy my book with largely frustrating results, one thing became apparent: few publishing industry professional are willing to read unsolicited works any more, let alone take the risk of publishing non-mainstream books via the traditional route. Liquidambar is neither an experimental novel nor did I set out to write an airport blockbuster. But I remain convinced that it’s original and that a substantial readership exists for it.
Hence my decision to enter the PABD/UKA “Search For A Great Read (SFAGR)” competition.
Liquidambar was shortlisted, and eventually won. My good friend and fellow Krakenista Richard Cooper also had his novel, All My Own Work, shortlisted. We had read each other’s books and I honestly thought his to be a worthy winner — I still do — but, in the interim, having been heavily involved in the later stages of the saga, I’m sure Richard is pleased his book didn’t win the SFAGR.
The acquisitions editor at the co-organising publisher, UKA Press, worked with me to ready my manuscript for publication, and I was naïve enough to believe that the end of my writing troubles were nigh: surely a mainstream publisher worth its salt would be interested in a prize-winning, professionally edited novel for which the cover art (owned by me) and pre-press files had been prepared at someone else’s expense. Publishing costs would be substantially reduced, and there had already been a certain amount of marketing, national radio and press around SFAGR both locally and internationally (including a mean-spirited piece in the Sunday Star-Times, that didn’t waste a word on Liquidambar’s literary merits or, indeed, the lack of them, but instead, in a sublime piece of serendipity that would have tickled its hack protagonist Typo Blod, managed to misquote me and misspell his name).
If I couldn’t interest a publisher in my book, perhaps I could at least sway some literary agents to do a bit of work in exchange for their 15/20 percent… To date, however, nada.
As it turns out, literary competitions are ten-a-penny. The Guardian’s books section noted at the time: “…the literary world is unable to go a week without being overwhelmed by the compulsion to give someone, somewhere a prize”. The literary establishment, on the other hand, have been overwhelmed only by the compulsion not to read my book. And, how can you get onto a major long-lists, let alone a shortlist, if your book is still languishing in a publisher slush-pile somewhere?
Last October, I decided to register Liquidambar with what was then Google Print (later to become Google Book Search), a service that promised to scan and index pages and make them available to internet users via a new function embedded in the Google search engine. Unfortunately, a file-naming error (damn and blast those impossibly long ISBNs) has delayed the book’s acceptance to Amazon UK’s very similar ‘Search Inside’ programme, with which I also registered last October.
The Google Book Search service is still in beta, but it’s already a powerful tool — for authors, publishers and internet users alike. You only see a “snippet” view of each work, not the whole book, thus negating widely publicised concerns over copyright and lost-sales.
The great thing about it is that you have a chance of attracting readers who may otherwise never have stumbled across your page at Amazon, through closely targeted searches. If, for example, you were eccentric enough to search on the words “Typo Blod” in Google Book Search, not only would you find my book at the top of the result list, it would be the only hit. Mind you, why anybody would be weird enough to use those search terms is anybody’s guess, but a quick look at your own website’s search statistics will provide ample evidence that there are lots of weirdos out there.
Far more sensible searches, however, including some of the distinctive titles of Edward Hopper’s paintings (each chapter in Liquidambar is named after a well-known Hopper work), also return Liquidambar very highly. The titles, “Tables For Ladies”, “Shakespeare At Dusk” and “Compartment C, Car 293” (with or without the comma) each return Liquidambar at the top of Google Books’ search list. Of course, if you merely search on “Edward Hopper” you’d have to dig a lot deeper — but that’s only fair; mine isn’t a book about Hopper, but about his works.
So how does any of this help a struggling novelist? Well, as I’ve said, authors of self-published or print-on-demand books have an uphill struggle getting their work noticed — either by readers or by the industry. Hopper fans interested enough in their favourite painting to search for a book about it might find that one set in ‘Hopperworld’ tugs on their purse-strings. Suddenly, Book Search becomes a much more powerful tool. Sure, my book costs £11.00 from Amazon UK and, by the time you’ve added freight to that you’ll be the better part of 20 quid poorer. But bundle your order with a couple of CDs, a DVD or, um… a Weightwatchers 8976U Glass Body Monitoring Precision Electronic Scale, and it starts to sound more cost-effective.
It may be a coincidence (or even an error) but since Liquidambar has been on Google Book Search, its “sales rank” on Amazon UK has leapt from 920,158 on 3 February to 232,593 today. Between February and December of 2005, it languished somewhere between the 1,000,000 and the 800,000 mark. To put all this firmly into perspective, my favourite author Russell Hoban’s latest book Linger Awhile, from the Bloomsbury Harry Potter stable, is sitting at 7242, and Dan Browne’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code is at 37.
Liquidambar has been on the Amazon UK site for well over a year. Those of my friends who care about such things regularly quiz me, “So, how’s the book selling?” and I’m sure they think I’m just being cagey but I really wish I could tell them. It honestly isn’t as easy as it sounds. So, before calling me up in the hope I’ll shout you lunch at Antoine’s to celebrate my new-found status as a “bestselling novelist” (ha!), there are a few things you ought to know:
1. PABD, the “publisher” (although that term isn’t suited to the world of print-on-demand, I don’t know what else to call it) of Liquidambar, has so far accounted for just a handful of copies sold through the trade. At one time, PABD was also selling the book directly from its own site, but since it stopped doing so it has failed to link my page to Amazon UK. I’ve received only two royalty statements from PABD, and they were so vague that they put a new slant on the term “creative accounting”. A group of four PABD authors, including myself, are now taking them to task over their shonky practices — if necessary, publicly.
2. Amazon UK’s sales rank shows only a book’s position relative to other books in the online store. There might be a plausible explanation for Liquidambar’s sudden leap up its sales ranks, but the only one I can think of would be the sudden deletion of over 600,000 titles from Amazon’s database.
3. It’s proven virtually impossible to persuade anyone to review my book on its own merits. Although Kathy Hunter at Leaf Salon was keen, and Art News had a copy of it (with its art-related content in mind), to date, the only detailed review that has appeared, other than those written by allies and compatriots at Amazon, is this thought-provoking, if not entirely positive, piece by Andrew Hook at Infinity Plus in the UK. Oh well. As Ricky Gervais commented in the January issue of Q magazine as part of his interview with Coldplay’s Chris Martin, the only way to avoid the “difficult second album” syndrome is to make sure that your first album is crap… At least this reviewer put some thought into it and had taken the trouble to read some of my other fiction.
4. A review copy sent to the Guardian when it started reviewing print-on-demand books was met with silence, and attempts by both Richard Cooper in the UK (who’s kindly been acting as an “unpaid agent” — by my calculations, 15 percent of nothing is still nothing), and myself to cajole the paper into responding, using Terry Gilliam-like tactics, resulted in the literary equivalent of tumbleweed borne on a cold, desert wind. When finally Mrs Ian McEwan, Annalena McAfee, the Guardian reviews editor, did respond, her letter to me was addressed to “Auckland, Australia”. We’re planning to buy her a map for her birthday.
4. In spite of the fact that it was part of the SFAGR prize, Liquidambar is still not available for sale via Amazon.com, 16 months later. This, according to PABD, is because the pre-press file supplied to the US printer was corrupt. Curiously, nobody informed either PABD or myself of this minor detail. The file I supplied to PABD was just fine, as it had been professionally ‘flight-checked’ by Digital River in Auckland.
Liquidambar is currently with a reader from the New Zealand branch of a multinational publisher. But until I see a royalty statement that shows some accurate Amazon UK sales figures, it seems I’ll have to resort to old-fashioned methods of promoting it.
Wanna buy a book?
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