It's Friday so we are doing our usual shout-out to all writers - please submit your stories to our Friday flash Fiction website.

The Friday flash fiction challenge is a 100-word original story. It's fun to do, it can help get those creative juices flowing and it could spur you on to further creative endeavours. Perhaps your 100-word story could form the basis for something longer - maybe even a novel..?

To inspire you, here's an example from Gordon Lawrie using a character from his book Four Old Geezers and a Valkyrie:

WINNERS AND LOSERS

I’d watched my friend Fleece lose money all night. Exactly what had induced him to take on One-Eyed Jake in a head-to-head Laredo crap game I couldn't imagine, but he was determined to see it through.

In the nick of time, Fleece threw a double six. “Aha!”

One-Eyed Jake eyed Fleece up, then threw a triple seven. “Ha!”

Fleece stood up. “There were only two dice a minute ago!”

Suddenly Jake was on his feet, too. “You calling me a cheat?”

Fleece paused to study the gun pointing at his ample midriff.

“No,” he replied, “I’d say you’re very good.”

Wired.com lists the reasons why self-publishing is good for authors, publishers and the public in general.

Shannon Mayer, the author of several self-published urban fantasy novels, told Wired.com that she saw self-publishing as food for the publishing industry itself.

She thought self-publishing made authors much more engaged, as she herself spends an hour a day interacting with fans on Facebook.

Mayer also credits self-publishing with creating more productive authors – she has published 25 books in the last four years, and almost all of them have earned 4.5 or 5-star ratings. Self-published books tend to be more affordable too – Mayer’s are priced at $3 to $4, profitable enough for her to leave her job, but cheap enough to keep people buying.

A new author has joined the Comely Bank Publishing stables - Jane Tulloch';s debut novel Our Best Attention is due out early next year. 

This warm-hearted story set in an Edinburgh department store, Murrays, begins in 1975 as the store celebrates its centenary. It is the preoccupation of its current director, Miss Margaret Murray, to maintain standards yet move the creaking edifice into the 1970s without losing its unusual ethos. 

Despite its beautiful, inconvenient, theatrical building, Murrays is a place largely defined by its staff and customers: their dramas, comedies and tragedies large and small mark each working day. Life, death, laughter and some big surprises go on at Murrays.

From Barry, the inept head of security, to a certain high profile customer the stories cover a wide variety of issues faced and managed to a greater or lesser extent by the people who work or shop in this magnificent edifice. 

Meanwhile, Jane has written a blog for us, where she talks about writing and how she does it in our Writers Diaries section.


 

More than 500 authors have asked the US Department of Justice to investigate what they claim is Amazon’s book monopoly.

The Authors United group has submitted a formal request to the DoJ, stating that Amazon has repeatedly blocked or limited the sale of thousands of books on its website, sold some books below cost to gain market share and tried to force customers to buy books from its own imprints, rather than from other customers.

The list of authors includes Scott Turow and Nora Roberts. Ursula K Le Guin, best-selling author and Amazon critic, said she feared Amazon had amassed too much influence over publishers and authors. Defenders of Amazon have said its self-publishing platform allows unknown authors to get wide exposure.

Amazon is the largest single bookseller in the US, thought to control some 40 percent of the new book market and almost two-thirds of the e-book market.

Read the full story here. 

Self-publishing is the choice for one academic because he wants as many people as possible to read his latest book.

So says Richard Sugg in a piece for Times Higher Education, author of A Century of Supernatural Stories which is about to be published on Kindle and via CreateSpace, as a print on demand paperback.

Sugg has previously published five books with academic presses and he is a lecturer in the English studies department at Durham University. He has opted for Kindle this time he says he wants a lot of people to read it, and it allows him to price his book at a reasonable price which makes it attractive to those buying “on spec”.

In trade publishing, he says, it is difficult to sell non-fiction unless you have a television tie-in or a difficult lives tale to tell. Self-publishing is a way of testing this claim. The author also wants to encourage people to share their supernatural experiences with him.

Today's Guardian carries an article in which food writer Prue Leith bemoans the fact that cookery books look lovely but then stay on the coffee table unused in the kitchen.

I'm sure she's right. Almost all of my favourite cookery books are actually little paperbacks with no pictures at all – top of the list being Elizabeth David's Italian Food and – when we were younger – Jennie Reekie's Traditional French Cooking. (That says something about how our eating tastes have changed over forty years as well, I suppose.) If we want something basic and British, we have an old Good Housekeeping book which we bought, again, before we were married. I've always found that my final dish is a bit of a disappointment compared to the photos anyway. Both Rick Stein and Nigel Slater have written great books with very few pics in the past.

If you haven't got the imagination to think what something should look like, then perhaps ordering a pizza isn't such a bad idea after all.

I've nothing against coffee-table books with lots of pictures, but my preference is for the ones which tell you a lot about the culture as well as how to cook – Georgio Locatelli has a wonderful book called Made In Italy and Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem is full of stuff about the city. "Books of cookery series" are a waste of time as far as I'm concerned, though.

One last thing: there's always an exception. If you can ever manage to lay your hands on a copy of the long-out-of-print A Taste Of Scotland by Theodora Fitzgibbon then grab it with both hands. On one page is an old black-and-white historical photo – anything from photos of villagers at St Kilda to pictures of Arbroath Smokies being made; on the opposite page, a simple classic Scots cookery recipe and a few explanatory notes. Absolutely the best Scots cookery book ever ever.

– GL

P.S. What's YOUR favourite cookery book, then? Why not let us know?

Nick Spalding’s self-publishing success is the subject of an article in today’s Express Online.

In the article, Spalding admits that his first goal with self-publishing was to make £50 or £60 – enough money to take his partner out for a meal. Initial sales of his book Life… With No Breaks published in 2010 were low because there was no Amazon UK store at that time, but once that store opened, Spalding’s book sales took off and he eventually got into the top 50, selling 80,000 books.

His book Love… From Both Sides self-published in 2012 sold quarter of a million copies and is still the number five best-selling independent book on Kindle. The book’s success brought him to the attention of Hodder and Stoughton. He signed a deal with the publishing company and quit his job as a press officer for Hampshire Police to write full time.

He starts writing every day at 10am and writes 2,000 words a day, taking him two and a half to three months to write a book.

So, for those of you who can't wait, here's a sneak preview of the front cover of Jane Tulloch's debut novel – due out January 2016!

Book sales don’t happen by luck or accident, according to a recent article by Spiffing Covers, which has listed steps to help promote further book sales for self-published authors.

Naturally enough, the book cover service site specifies a stunning cover as one step claiming an increase of more than double the sales for two different covers, but other steps include:

An arresting blurb – concise, true, edited and intriguing.

A professional edit – the worst person to edit a book is the author, as the author is likely to be too close to the manuscript. An editor’s job, Spiffing Covers says, is to take the story and turn it into a perfectly written book without changing its style or tone at all.

Know your market – knowing the ins and outs of a selling platform will enhance your chances of sales, say for instance selling on Amazon Kindle and Createspace for print-on-demand paperbacks. And remember that different platforms will work better in different continents.

An online presence – a modern necessity, but vital; for driving traffic to your selling platforms.

Getting your pricing right – consider what you would pay an independent author with only one or two books published and start from there. As you become better known and your sales increase, you can start to charge more for books.

Write more books – most, if not all of us, will choose to buy books from authors we have read previously. Sometimes, we don’t even bother reading the book’s blurb before buying. 

   
With thanks to Spiffing Covers.

To buy Comely Bank Publishing books, click here for a link to our online book shop. Books include Four Old Geezers and a Valkyrie, The An From Outremer and Katie and the Deelans, with three further novels scheduled for publication early next year.  

Prize draw entries, cultivation of reviews, extensive emailing and more were just some of the lessons learned from self-publishing expressed by one newbie writer.

Lisa Marie Wilson writes about the valuable information she found out when she decided to self-publish her first book, Traveling Daisy: A Generational Cancer Book of Disease and Dysfunction. in today's Huffington Post. 

 Wilson says she decided against a print version of her book, having heard too many stories of authors investing too much money in soft-covered books and having boxes of them in their garages for years to come.

She watched webinars, read e-books and did extensive internet research to find out how to sell and market her book, the proceeds of which she has donated to cancer research.

Wilson says she emailed everyone she knew, she offered entry into a prize draw to anyone who bought and reviewed her book in order to get the numbers of book reviews up. (She currently has 40 reviews on Amazon.)

Second time round and Wilson says she’s not sending out query letters for book number two, but she will be creating a funny book trailer to post on social media and she’s hiring a photographer to shoot her front cover.

Wilson’s final tip on what she learned from self-publishing her first book is the importance of a thick skin.

A former Avon lady’s self-published memoir of her grandmother has become the top-selling non-fiction book on Kindle Direct Publishing.

Donna Foley Mabry used the tricks she’d learned as an Avon lady to help sell her books. Her first book was about Las Vegas and she has now written 12 books. Her latest book, Maude, is a biography of her grandmother released in October 2014 and achieving Wall Street Journal non-fiction e-book best-seller status and receiving more than 9,000 reviews on Amazon.

The book is to be translated into German, Russian and Italian.

Do you have a 100-word story you'd like to contribute to our Friday Flash Fiction sister site? Today';s the day to do it...

Just to give you an idea of what flash fiction is, here is an example from Comely Bank Publishing's managing director, Gordon Lawrie:

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE ON THE No36 BUS

On the lower deck of the bus, Roseanne sat reading Pride And Prejudice.

Across the isle, three women discussed fridge contents – fruit, chicken needing to be used, some broccoli.

Behind Roseanne, two men discussed fingernail-clipping and shaving techniques. However, their switch of topics to deodorants was just too much for her.

“Shut the **** up! I’m trying to read!”

As instructed, everyone was immediately silent; fourteen faces turned towards Roseanne unblinkingly. Then the whispering started.

“Who does she think she is?”

“I’ve got a Kindle.”

“I’ve read 50 Shades.”

“What’s reading?”

Roseanne sighed, shut her book, then closed her eyes.

Independent female authors are thriving – according to a recent article in the Guardian.

Yesterday (Wednesday 5 August), Amazon unveiled its top-selling ebook authors and the top 20 list includes self-published author, Rachel Abbot.

Abbot is the most popular self-published Kindle author in the UK. She writes dark, psychological thrillers and she is number 14 in the list of top-selling ebooks.

She self-published her first book in November 2011, after having taken early retirement. The book started slowly, after she had emailed everyone she knew asking them to buy it but then sales began to pick up. She created her own marketing plan.

By February 2012, her book had become the number one best-selling self-published book. She has since published three more novels and her total sales (including the paperbacks which she has also self-published) total more than 1.5 million.

She marketed her books through Twitter and other social media. Her books are priced at £3.48 and considers herself as “doing well financially”. She has no plans to sign up with a mainstream publisher, although she does have an agent.

Tracy Bloom is the UK’s second most popular independently published author. There are six self-published authors in Amazon’s top 100 Kindle authors of all time (based on UK sales).

How well do you know the characters you have created?

Words with JAM - the ezine for writers - has created an exercise: a list of questions that you answer as one of your characters. It's a pretty detailed list, including questions such as what makes you easy/difficult to get along with, describe one of your rituals, what' the last thing you do before you go to sleep and are you normal.

Answering questions as one of your characters can really help you ensure that your character stays consistent throughout your book and can help you work out how describing a character's traits can help you move the plot along, or add in relevant detail.

You can try out the quiz at Words with Jam, here.

Knowing the genre of your book is very important - and the emerging trend of more nuanced and sub-genres means you can appeal to an established readership, according to a recent article by Spiffing Covers.

There are traditional genres which everyone knows such as romance, sci-fi, crime fiction, chick-lit and historical, but the more nuanced and emerging sub-genres can be crime-fantasy, quiet horror, eco-thriller, zombie romance, slipstream, low fantasy, hard sci-fi and many more.

According to the article, self-published authors should think about where their existing and future titles fit in with this list of searchable keywords, as there will be people out searching for such books by the genre. 

The article continues: "There is a reason that particular genres emerge and exist and that is simply that similar books are popular enough, for long enough to require a common identifier allowing them to be searched and bought. 

"The genres defined by buying trends make money for retailers on and offline, allowing readers to get to the content they want as quickly as possible. Then, authors begin to write in response to those genres.

"If you think of genre as something to consider after writing you book, you may be missing out on the benefit of working with established and emerging search trends and genre definitions in mind. Your titles will have a genre which is most closely linked to a particular type of reader, or potential super-fan, and it makes perfect sense to be aware of this and write directly to that super-fan. This does not mean changing your writing to fit a genre or stereotype, but might be seen as allowing your writing to work with buying trends rather than against them, pushing the boundaries of genre in new and exciting ways.

"The more effectively you can identify your genre (niche or otherwise) and who you are writing for, the more sales you will make by appealing to the wants of those readers."

Article thanks to Spiffing Covers.

Liverpool City Council is preparing to hand over five libraries to local community groups to run, according to an article in the Liverpool Echo.

The five libraries are to be transferred to local groups to manage as part of wider cost-cutting measures instigated by the council. It follows a reprieve for 11 libraries threatened with closure last year.

According to the Echo, the Chartered Instituted of Library Information and Professionals (CILIP) president Jan Parry will also chair a task group looking at the future of the city's library service.

Authors including Alan Gibbons and Cathy Cassidy have campaigned to keep Liverpool's libraries open.

Some months ago, Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson warned that all the city's libraries could be closed by 2017 if the Conservatives won the election and council budget cuts continued.

Speaking to The Bookseller, Alan Gibbons said he believed in the central principle of council-run services and trained librarians. He said he regarded the move as a "retrograde" step and meant the future of the libraries was uncertain.