Watching people read our book

Phil: The Interweb is a wonderful thing that has changed all of our live, mostly for the better.

Authors like us can publish our book without recourse to the traditional gatekeepers of publishing houses. A few minutes work and your words can appear on Amazon available to all for purchase.

Working this way provides a completely new experience for the author – watching as people read your book.

I don’t mean looking over their shoulder as they leaf through the pages. That would be creepy and we’d probably get caught.

No, we can do this electronically. And no-one will know.

Anyone signed up to Amazon Prime can read books like ours for free and we are paid per page read. Yes, the more you read, the more money we make.

To provide results, there is a graph and it’s this that provides the entertainment. Every so often the line leaps into life and we know how many pages have been read each day.

The graph shows some action from last week. Total pages read, 475.

This is a bit odd as there are 313 pages in the Kindle edition of the book. Even if you lose the blank ones at the front and back, this is more than one read through but less than two. Not sure what is happening but we’ll not worry too much. What I do know if people do pick it up electronically and read our story, which is the point of the whole job. Every time the line surges skyward, I imagine a reader enjoying the story so much they can’t put the book down!

Why can’t I click on the page?

From: Clients from Hell.net

Client: I love the flyer you sent! It’s clicky!

Me: Great! So we’re done now?

Client: No. When I print out the flyer, the links aren’t clicky. Can you make them clicky?

Me: I don’t understand.

Client: I want to be able to go to our website … when … um, when I …

Me: You do know that a piece of paper can’t be interactive, right?

Phil: I read (on-line) the posting above at the same time as I was reading (on-paper) “Who Goes There – Travels through strangest Britain in search of the Doctor” by Nick Griffiths, and it struck a chord.

I enjoy travel books. Sometimes they make me want to go and see the places described. Mostly my traveling is vicarious but none the worse for that. I also love Dr Who. Put the two together and we should have a winner – right?

Wrong.

Even once you get past the stream of consciousness writing style (it calms down after the first few chapters) and the lack of capital letters in the title (Grrrr) there is a fundamental problem with the book. The author keeps referring readers to his website so they can see photos of the location he visits.  That’s lovely but I was reading on a train and so constantly being pointed at a web page was a reminder that I was missing out on a good chunk of the fun to be had from Griffiths travels.

To compound matters, he keeps referring to Who episodes that I don’t remember. I mean, I love classic Who, but I don’t have an encyclopedic memory of a TV show I watched when I was 5 or even one from before I was born. I’m nerdy, but not that nerdy. Thus, I often have no idea what the location being visited looks like ‘cos I’ve not seen it on telly or on the web.

Frustrating. Very.

But, Candice and I were chatting about this over tea and squash earlier in the week, more and more people are reading on eBooks. Travel on the tube in that there London and you’ll hardly see the traditional paperback. It’s all iPads and Kindles now.

These are perfect for a book like this. If I want to see the picture, I can click on a link and assuming I’m not in a signal-free tunnel, up the photo will pop. If licensing were possible, even a clip from the show could be included. All this makes writing a rather more involved job than traditional, but it creates a very different type of book/website hybrid that could be very exciting.

None of this works (for me) on paper but it does beg a question. If the eBook/website hybrid is the way things are going, has this book about a time traveller fallen back through a wormhole from a few years in the future?

Bereft without technology

Candice: I’ve just moved house and even though I am really organised, things have gone missing and I’m still playing catch up on letting people know- be they friends or gas suppliers. The thing that I have noticed the most is the lack of having Internet access and how this hampers you.

Luckily I changed my iPad at Christmas and bought a SIM card enabled one so we so have some access. But, there are lots of things you need to do on a laptop or PC. At least on line shopping isn’t hampered by a lack of Internet access, I’ve been doing a lot of that!

The house we have bought needs a lot of work on it, I’ve been describing it as 1955 house with 1970’s decor. It’s the house that time stood still as far as bathrooms and kitchens are concerned. However, we decided we wanted a project, and we need the room. Why, you cry? Well come January next year there will be an extra person in the Nolan household, and I don’t mean another cat.

Going back to that lack of Internet and TV,  part of me wonders if this is not a bad thing. Richard and I have been down to the pub, been to see friends, actually watched some of the DVDs we own in the last few days, along side the constant need for unpacking. Tonight might actually be the first night we sit down for more than half and hour as I’ve finally unpacked most of it, he has been to work today.

I could do some reading too but seem to be without books, so a trip to the charity shop in Stratford is called for. Hey, maybe we’ll save the extortionate amount we pay to Virgin and stay off the grid. Somehow I don’t think so.