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Grab a fistful of MDNA: Spotlight on Madonna and what we can learn from her as writers and publishers

Now those of you that follow this blog will know that I don’t normally do this.

I am not one for bleating on about “how to” and “what you can learn from a best-selling writer“… etc etc.

There are two reasons for this:

1. I am no expert and am still learning every day.

2. The writing/publishing universe is FULL of self-righteous blog posts, tweets, books and pages of this ilk.

I mean, let’s face it, if I had all the answers, I wouldn’t be blogging about it now would I?

So you’ll be pleased to know that today will be no different. This isn’t a blog about guaranteeing you overnight success as a writer or publisher. If that’s what you want, then please (I mean, seriously, please) look elsewhere.

No, this is a blog post about how we can learn from one of THE most successful singer/songwriter/performer/actor/writer/movie producer/director/record label owner/fund raiser/fashion designer and style icons of the last quarter of a century. Oh and did I mention singer? Yep, the Queen of pop (how long ago was she given THAT crown) herself, the mother of re-invention and bouncebackability, Madge/Madonna/God.

 So who’s that then? I hear you cry? Why, when we are talking about a woman who is now worth a reputed $320 million (yeah, and the rest!) have I stuck a picture of some random nobody in this blog post?

Erm, nope, that IS Madonna. Albeit about 35 years ago, but it is her.

Ok, if you look again, you can tell it’s her, but you get my point.

Today, tickets to her latest and NINTH world tour go on sale to the general public. Let’s see how long it takes for them to sell out shall we?

I wonder how many pre-orders for MDNA, the new album have been taken already?

How many people watched the Super Bowl half-time show?

Can I be a dollar behind the t-shirt sales income when she goes on tour? Can I? Please?

I tell you what, scratch all that, just gimme one tiny molecule of MDNA. Just one little, microscopic strand of it to replicate. I am sure that if there was a way to bottle it up or sell it as an implant, she’d have found it, being the business-genius that she is, but unfortunately, for the rest of us mere mortals, all we can do is learn from her; learn from the best.

Now, I am not suggesting that you should all fall in love with her and start ripping the bottoms off your tights and blasting your under-arms with upturned hand dryers in train station toilets, that would just be downright silly (come on, admit it. How many girls of the eighties went through the ‘dressing-like-Madonna-in-desperately-seeking-susan-phase’?) but what I am saying is: follow her lead.

Let’s take a look at what I am talking about: I am gonna start backwards here…

Her new film, W.E. was released a couple of weeks ago so there were TV show interviews, appearances at the awards, magazine covers and articles and general, all-round red carpet treatment hype, but Madge had been at it WAY before that promoting it. She began hitting the film festivals as far back as this time last year, selling the concept and basically flogging the rights to the highest bidder. And why not? Madonna had spent three years of her life on this project. She co-wrote it, she directed it and oh yeah, guess who produced it? You got it, Madonna’s OWN film company, Semtex Films.  It promises to be one of her greatest (movie-related) achievements so far. Aside from Evita, I think Madonna realised a long time ago that she would never win an Oscar for her acting, so what did she do? She went the other side of the camera. She knew that any film she was involved in would do m0derately well anyway, so she used her BRAND. Not a bad move eh? and great if you have the money to back it up. W.E. won numerous accolades at the recent award ceremonies for music and costume design. It looks like a great film and it’s fair to say, she won’t be out of pocket for it. It won’t have done her reputation any harm either. But what else did it do? Hmmn, let’s see. IT PUT HER BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT.

OK, she is never too far away from it, she makes sure of that, but musically, she hasn’t done a great deal just recently. Her last studio album was ‘Hard Candy’, waaay back in 2008. ‘Celebration’ (a  greatest hits compilation) followed for 2009 and there was the ‘Sticky & Sweet Tour‘ afterwards, but as for releasing a new single, she’d been pretty silent on that front for a looooong time. Now everyone knows that she can release anything she likes, when she likes and people will buy it. She has a HUGE and die-hard fan base, but what about the younger generation of wannabees? A world tour is no mean feat and you can’t just rely on your fans from 20 years ago. There’s a new sound now, her style of pop isn’t mainstream anymore. I mean, hell, some of the kids/young adults buying music now probably haven’t even heard of her. So what does she do?

Well, she does this…

http://youtu.be/s0euJ58Zbpo

Talk about a comeback!

Hmmn, how do I get the worlds’ attention the day I announce my new tour? I know, I’ll hijack the half-time performance at one of the biggest sporting events EVER and drag along some of today’s most well-known stars to support me, who, everyone recognises. Enter Nicki Minaj, Cee-lo Green and M.I.A. Genius. Talk about working social media to its fullest advantage. Not only was everyone talking about Madonna, but every time someone mentioned one of the other stars or their performance, guess who else got a shout-out?  In fact, why not go the whole hog and get Ms. Minaj to feature on my new single? Hell, let’s get her to sing about me on it too.

L-U-V Madonna
Y-O-U You wanna
I see you coming and I don’t wanna know your name
L-U-V Madonna
I see you coming and you’re gonna have to change the game
Y-O-U You wanna
Would you like to try?
Give me a reason why
Give me all that you got
Maybe you’ll do fine
As long as you don’t lie to me
And pretend to be what you’re not

I don’t care whether you love her or hate her. You cannot deny how jaw-droppingly awesome that was.

So, all of a sudden, Madonna has re-invented herself – again.

It is what has kept her career alive and people talking about her for the past quarter of a century. It is why today will be CRAZY with people trying to get tickets for the MDNA World tour. It is why the pretenders to her throne come and go like unfunny court jesters, only to be wafted away with a barely-noticeable wiggle of those bony fingers.

MADONNA is a business woman.

She isn’t a singer or a song-writer. She’s not a film producer or actress, she isn’t even an author (in case you were wondering where this blog post is going, I know I am!), although she has written a series of great children’s’ books, no, she is an entrepeneur.

THAT is my point. (phew, I hear you cry! We got there in the end).

What’s her secret formula? Her unique (M) DNA structure? SHE GIVES THE PUBLIC WHAT THEY WANT.

She isn’t bound by genre. She can write and record what she likes. Just check out her back catalogue.

She sees someone she thinks has potential in the music industry. What does she do? Beg the gatekeepers to give them a listen? Nope, she sets up her own record label. Maverick records signed Alanis Morrissette and The Prodigy. ’nuff said.

When she first stepped onto the New York gold-paved streets at the age of 19 with $36 in her pocket, she couldn’t get anyone to take her seriously. What did she do? She learned the drums and formed her own band. The rest, as they say, is musical history.

As writers (and digital publishers) today, in this current climate, it is no longer enough to scribble down 75,000 words and sit back, Patterson-esque style, whilst thousands of readers clamber to buy your books. Hello? News flash! You have to work hard. Damn hard.

This is what we’re doing. We’re building a brand.

We could have sat back in May 2011 when Sugar & Spice was selling 950 copies a day and riding high at #2 in the UK Kindle charts and plodded along with another book.

We didn’t.

Sugar & Spice has sold over 125,000 copies and is still selling 1000’s a month.

It is no secret that we now have our own publishing company. MWiDP.com will be up and running in the late spring (it is live now in beta/development phase), as will our new digital bookstore, with a stable of over 35 new writers offering over 100 titles to EVERYONE, ANYWHERE in the world.

We have just released our second short story anthology, Saffina Desforges presents…The Kindle coffee-break collection Vol 2. Number 3 is coming very soon, as is #4. 

We also (kinda, ahem) admit to endorsing and writing the intro to a new erotica anthology, Aphrodysia Vol 1, plus a title from hot new erotica writer, Aphrodite’s Lover

Ok, it may not be everyone’s (or our current readers’) cup of tea, but there is a market out there for it and we’re business people right? After all, there’s a link to OUR books on their sites and in their books, sharing the love, right? 😉

Hopefully, Rapunzel will be out late spring and we are working on LOTS of other projects. We are building a brand.

Granted, Saffina Desforges may not bring up as many hits as Her Madgesty does when you pop it into Google (other generic search engines are available) but you can bet your life you’ll have to scroll through a good many pages before you hit stories about Saffy from Ab fab! (In fact, to my amazement, whilst checking the facts & writing this blog, the page count is 41 and SD returned 71,300 hits!)

So you get my drift.

Writing today is a business, not a craft and if I have learned one thing from Madonna, my life-long idol and inspiration, it is this:

No one knows you better than you know yourself,
Do the thing you want don’t wait for someone else.

So that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re writing what we like, what we think readers want to read. We’re helping other writers make it too. We’re sharing our experiences and building that ‘cloud partnership’ that Mark Williams (my co-writer and business partner) is always going on about, we are building our empire (ok, maybe empire is a tad optimistic, but ya hear me right?) and we’re getting as many books out there that link back to us as possible.

A year ago, if someone told me that I would be a business-woman and that I would have tax returns to look forward to, I’d have swirled my index finger around in the air at my temple and smiled politely at them.

Today, I am desperately scrambling around for the receipts for my accountant – and it’s all thanks to you, Madge. 😉

Maybe a tiny little bit of your Madgerochondrial  Deoxyribonucleic acid did fall my way after all.

Now excuse me whilst I go and join the other many millions or so plebs around the world currently stuck in cyber-traffic trying to get their hands on a golden ticket for your show. I know my place.

Saffi

PS. UPDATE: As we go to press (ooh, check me out!) I found this link. It puts Sugar & Spice as the 11th top selling ebook of 2011! How cool. Made my day. Not bad for a debut novel that agents were too scared to rep 😉

 Have a great weekend.

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by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on February 10, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on February 10, 2012

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Play it forward – where next for MWiDP?

Pay It Forward.

How often do we hear that in the world of indie publishing? It has become the mantra of the indie movement, to the point where recently some bloggers were actually arguing over who thought of it first! The mind boggles.

In fact the concept has been about since forever. It was in use by the Greek dramatist Menander in 317BC, and the first recorded example in the US was Benjamin Franklin, who lent money to someone and asked them not to repay Franklin but to instead lend that money to another person in need. Similar sentiments were later echoed by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The actual term was in use from the early part of the twentieth century, and became popularised by Robert A. Heinlein‘s sci-fi classic Between Planets.

But of course the phrase took on a life of its own after Catherine Ryan Hyde‘s novel Pay It Forward was published in 1999. The film quickly followed. A movement was born. A decade on and the Pay It Forward movement is still going strong, guided by the Pay It Forward Foundation Catherine founded.

What does this have to do with MWiDP? Bear with me. There are two big announcements from MWiDP today.

~

First, some background for the many newer visitors here.

When we slipped our debut novel Sugar & Spice into the murky waters of the Amazon ocean fifteen months ago it was, more than anything else, an act of defiance against the gatekeepers. Not so much desperation as sheer frustration.

There was no carefully thought out marketing plan. No launch party. No blogs. No tweets. It was whole new world, and one we knew next to nothing about.

Ebooks were still in their infancy, Kindle UK was about to experience its very first Christmas, and we just sat back and hoped someone might buy our unknown and unloved book.

Of course, no-one did.

This time last year we had sold nothing. And we were still querying. It seemed our best bet at the time. And maybe, at the time, it was.

And then around February / March we got the serious interest of an agent. A real-life literary agent wanted our book! By then it was just starting to sell a few copies on Amazon, but the agent wasn’t interested in that. She liked the book, but ebooks were just a fad. So the agent took our book under exclusive review, and we sat and hoped.

Three months passed. When she finally got back to us with her decision she wanted us to take down the ebook so she could approach publishers.

That was a close call. If she’d got back to us sooner we might well have fallen for it.

Trouble was, in that three months she had sat on our novel we had somehow sold thirty thousand books. Ebooks a fad? Clearly this was an agent who had no future. And, we realised, querying had no future either.

A month on and we had sold fifty thousand and were the second biggest-selling ebook in the country. The agents started to query us!

Again it was a close call. Big promises, tempting “unofficial” offers, but accompanied by draconian contract conditions. We stayed indie.

Regrets?

You’ve got to be kidding! That same book went on to sell another fifty thousand before it began to wind down on Amazon (not helped by the infamous three week disappearance!). And by then we were riding high in Waterstone’s, the UK’s equivalent of B&N.

Meanwhile we had brought out another book, got on with some other writing projects, and began to look at the bigger picture.

MWiDP was born.

Little could we have imagined that, just months later, we’d have one of the biggest names in modern English literature sign with us.

~

The big news this week, of course, is the announcement, first made on Anne R. Allen’s blog on Sunday, that Anne and NYT best-selling author of Pay It Forward author Catherine Ryan Hyde turned their back on the trad publishers in favour of joining forces with MWiDP.

In Anne’s own words:

The book I’ve been writing with Catherine Ryan Hyde, HOW TO BE A WRITER IN THE E-AGE—and keep your E-sanity! will be published by Mark Williams international in June of 2012. The book will be available as an ebook that will include free six-month updates. AND it will also be available in paper in both a US and UK edition.

We’ve had some interest from more traditional publishers, but decided to go with the innovative people at MWiDP because we need a nimble publisher who can keep up with industry changes and offer timely updates. Also, Catherine has a large international fan base, which made “Mr. International’s” offer especially attractive.

The fab cover is the working design, courtesy of our designer in residence Athanasios.

How To Write in the E-Age and Keep Your E-Sanity will be the first of many books under our non-fiction / education imprint Writers Without Frontiers, aimed at fellow authors, at whatever stage of their career they are at.

As well as more books for this imprint we’ll also be teaming up with other industry professionals to bring online writing courses and other resources to help the growing number of people worldwide who want to realize their dreams of being a writer.

And just to add there will be a prize draw in June to mark the launch of How to be a Writer in the E-Age. And not just any old prize.

We’re talking a first edition of the zillion-selling Pay It Forward, signed by Catherine Ryan Hide herself!

~

Yep, I had to read it twice too. Catherine Ryan Hyde is now an MWiDP author!

Writers Without Frontiers is just one of several imprints that will see MWiDP expand rapidly in 2012.

Our YA imprint will launch this spring, commencing with the long-awaited St. Mallory’s series, and though it’s not official yet we may well have another fantastic YA title going live with it. More on that in the near future.

We have some great titles pending for our Exotica imprint, all about travel and stories set in distant lands.

And for those so inclined we have also launched our mature-audience imprint, Aphrodysia, with the first book due out for St. Valentine’s Day.

Those not so inclined will be pleased to know covers and content will not be appearing alongside the other books, unlike on Amazon where some seriously disturbing covers are prone to pop up alongside MG titles.

Several other imprint ideas are being developed, which we’ll bring news of all as and when.

~

Enhanced ebooks are of course high on our agenda to progress, and we’ll be making some announcements on this in the next few months. We have some trial projects under way, but won’t give details until we have a clearer picture.

We also have plans for audio books, and are currently examining ways in which this can work in the new indie publishing world. More on this in coming weeks.

In the very near future we’ll be moving into print-on-demand publishing for some of our titles. While there can be no doubt the days of bricks and mortar stores are numbered, there will be a small but significant market for print for the foreseeable future, and as POD technology improves and prices drop, POD will become the only real alternative to ebooks.

Meanwhile our tech team Elizabeth (she may only be one person, but she does the work of many!) has been hard at it behind the scenes with the new websites and the ebook store. All now very close to completion.

Take a sneak peak at www.mwidp.com.

~

The ebook store, indiebooksunited, is hardly going to challenge Amazon’s supremacy, of course, so important to remind ourselves why we felt it necessary at all.

I asked an author recently if they would be interested in the ebook store and they answered, “Why? I’m selling through Amazon.” I put it to him he might sell even more if he was in other stores. He answered, “But I don’t need to be. I’ve ticked world rights. I’m available everywhere.” I tried not to laugh.

For anyone who missed it, do check out the MWi post Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Aakash  which explains how Amazon either blocks downloads or surcharges buyers across much of the world.

Above is a screen shot of what I see when I try to buy one of your books. Check out the green box at top right. (You may need to click on the image to enlarge.)

Check out the MWi post referred to above for real numbers about just how many potential buyers cannot buy your ebook from Amazon.

There’s also this strange idea that someone who has bought a Kobo ereader, or a Sony or an iRiver, or myriad other alternatives to the Kindle, is somehow going to make Amazon their first stop for ebooks. Yeah, right. Just like us Kindle users always go shopping in B&N and Diesel…

~

The recent introduction of KDP Select has raised the issue of exclusivity once again. Leaving aside the good or bad aspects of KDP Select itself, let us briefly ponder exclusivity.

If we had chosen only to list with Amazon last year would we have sold as many books? Unequivocally no.

Of course we are on Apple, Kobo and B&N too. Kobo is a rising star, as I’ve said many times here on MWi. Just this week Kobo announced plans for expansion to ten new countries, including Japan and Brazil, just as the Amazon’s Japan plans have stalled.

Kobo has also partnered with WH Smiths, one of the leading UK retail stores. Kobo is the place to be in 2012-15.

If you’re not on Kobo, or are on Kobo through Smashwords and seeing no results, then be sure to check out the announcement at the end of this post.

But Amazon, B&N, Apple and Kobo are not the be all and end all of ebook vendors, and only form part of our income.

In the latter part of 2011, long after the Amazon star had waned, we had two top ten hits simultaneously in Waterstone’s, the UK’s equivalent of B&N. We held the number two spot, kept off #1 only by the Steve Jobs biography, and for a long while the Saffina Desforges brand was the most searched for name in the store.

But we weren’t just selling there. Britain’s biggest retailer by far is the supermarket giant Tesco. It has its own e-book store.

Guess what? We’re in it.

Foyles? Yep, you’ll find us there.

Books, etc? Yeah, we’re there too.

Pickabook? Of course.

ACCO in Belgium? We used our ‘leetle grey cells’!

Selexyz in the Netherlands? We love the Dutch!

Fishpond down in New Zealand? Say hi down under!

Kalahari in South Africa? Of course!

I could go on. Our books will soon be appearing in Textr in Germany, Asia Books in Thailand, Eason’s in Ireland, Buscalibros in Chile, etc, etc. I’m not called Mr International for nothing!

There’s a whole world out there that could be reading your ebooks, if only they had the chance. True, the sales aren’t earth-shattering. But a sale is a sale, and that reader may tell a friend who tells a friend…

And sometimes it can be good to be a big fish in a small pond, as we found with Waterstone’s. Next time it could be you. But not if you’re not listed there.

Of course the problem is these stores aren’t indie friendly. Just the opposite. They make it almost impossible to get in. ISBNs are required pretty much everywhere except Amazon and B&N. That includes Apple and Kobo, which is why most people go through Smashwords.

But Smashwords won’t get you into Waterstone’s or Foyles, Fishpond or Kalahari. And apart from ISBNs there are a ton of other conditions to meet and hoops to jump through too, before these companies will even think of listing your title. For example Waterstone’s insist you are a VAT-registered company to set up an account.  For the US readers that means having an annual turnover of about $100k. Then you face the nightmare of keeping track, receiving payments, etc. It’s not easy.

Which brings us to the second big announcement of the day:

MWiDP can now offer your titles direct listings to these stores, and also Apple and Kobo.

We’ll be contacting you all shortly with further details. For anyone not currently with us who wants to know more, just drop me an email.

We hope to start uploading to Waterstone’s by the end of this month, and just in case you’re wondering how anyone will find you there, we’re delighted to tell you we have advanced promotion in hand. We own the domain name http://www.welovewaterstones.com and will be launching a big awareness campaign within the UK this spring aimed at bringing attention to your titles.

Oh, and did I mention we accidentally bought the domain names welovekoboebooks, welovetescoebooks, welovefishpondebooks and welovekalahariebooks too? 🙂

So, even though it may have seemed nothing much was happening, we have been busy behind the scenes. I’ll be elaborating on the various projects in more detail over the coming weeks here on MWi.

I’ll also be introducing the Book Theatre project to find narrators for audio books for your novels, and the Translator’s Co-op project to bring together a pool of novel translators worldwide to help get your books selling not just in the international stores, but in the local languages.

The trad publishers will tell you writers still need them because they can get you places you can’t get on your own. They have a point. Once you step outside the Amazon bubble being indie isn’t easy.

But with MWiDP you’re not on your own.  Many of our authors are already busy exchanging ideas and services. It’s all part of the cloud.

With MWiDP you get all the benefits of being indie but a lot less DIY.

Saffi & Mark

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by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on January 20, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on January 20, 2012

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Raise your glass! Goodbye 2011 and what’s on the way in 2012

So, happy New Years Eve eve! 😉

By the way, that was a question?

What IS on the way for 2012?

Now, as I’ve said before, my co-writer, mystic Mark (Williams), is the one with the crystal ball, so you won’t find much in the way of predictions here on this blog, more a review and reaction to what HAS happened, not what MIGHT. For all things digital publishing and spooky speculation, check Mark’s blog out. MWi.

But here, today, let me tell you what HAS happened in 2011 and what WILL happen in 2012.

  • We were the only TRUE indie writers to make #2 in the Amazon (UK) paid store and #1 in Thrillers with Sugar & Spice
  • We sold over 125,000 books in our first year of publication
  • We set up MWiDP and now have over 100 titles from 40 odd cool writers live on Amazon
  • We made #2 on Waterstones ebook chart
  • We turned down two of the biggest lit agents in the US
  • We accepted a French translation and publishing deal for Sugar & Spice from a forward-thinking publisher who listens
  • We teamed up with some awesome people (Miriam Joy, Charley Robson and Elizabeth Ann West. Jeroen ten Berge & Athanasios to name but a few) who we are hoping to do more brilliant things with in the next year!
  • We wrote and published 4 books
  • We built (with the help of the brilliant Kristen Lamb) a social platform across several blogs, twitter, Facebook and every other social networking tool imaginable, that now reaches and connects tens of thousands of people
  • We spent our lives in front of a computer (without which, none of the above would have been possible)

We did a lot of other things too. Occasionally slept, ate and saw friends and family, but not so much of that! 😉

It’s been a blast.

So, what’s next?

  • We will release Rapunzel in the first part of 2012
  • We will release Saffina Desforges presents...Vols 2 & 3 in the first quarter of 2012
  • We will release the co-written St.Mallory’s forever! in the first quarter of 2012
  • We will release the first book of The Chinatown Mysteries, co-written with Elizabeth Ann West in the summer of 2012
  • We will release Book One in our new dark, urban fantasy trilogy for Halloween 2012
  • We will release Beauty & the Beast (book 3) and Little Red Riding Hood (book 4) of The Rose Red crime thriller series
  • We will open our new indie world bookstore IBU (indiebooksunited.com) coming soon!
  • We will release Vols 4, 5 & 6 of Saffina Desforges presents…
  • We will continue to build and grow the MWiDP cloud sharing partnership
  • We will fall out and disagree A LOT (Mark and I, that is)
  • We might even sleep
Oh and in-between all that, we’re gonna teach the world to read!
In our spare time, we were planning on finding a way to shut Justin Beiber up, but that’s secondary! 😉 (I am also doing the Four Peaks challenge in May for charity and will be bugging you all to sponsor me. Details to come)
So, we’re gonna be busy to say the least.
We are HUGELY excited about the next twelve months and we wave good bye to the last with fondness as far as our writing and publishing careers are concerned.
All that remains is to wish you and yours a Happy New Year and hope that 2012 is great for you. Oh and to ask you this:
Will you be coming along for the ride?
Saffi
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by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on December 30, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on December 30, 2011

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Official annoucement: Publishing deal for ‘Sugar & Spice’ by Saffina Desforges

It’s been one crazy year for the Saffina Desforges team.

Last Christmas the brand was completely unknown. Two debut novelists (one a complete newbie, the other with background in TV and theatre, but that counts for little when writing a book) writing under a new name, Saffina Desforges. Their book, Sugar & Spice, was barely a month old on Amazon and had sold precisely nothing. We had hopes we might start moving with all the new Kindles in the UK market, but it was not to be. It wasn’t until February, three months after we launched, that we even made double figures!

It seemed the gatekeepers were right. Time and again they had turned us away, sometimes with encouraging words, more often not. At best we were told it was a great book but no publisher would touch it due to the sensitive subject matter.

In March, after endless months of rejection, we finally had an agent who seemed seriously interested, and took the book under exclusive consideration. Bear in mind the UK ebook market was still embryonic at this stage. Were there even enough people in the UK with e-readers to make ebooks viable?

We doubted it. So the latest agent seemed the answer to our dreams. At the time we would probably have signed anything she sent to us without even looking at it.  But the agent was slow. Very slow.  She loved the synopsis and openings and asked for the full script for her in-house reader. The in-house reader loved it. A glowing report came back. The agent asked for a further read.

Weeks became months. March became May. We became a lot more worldly-wise. When the final decision came, we realized just how crazy the old system was. The agent wanted us to take the ebook down so she could start touting to publishers. Three months earlier we would have done so. We were selling nothing. But this was three months later.

The week we sent our first rejection letter to an agent was the week Sugar & Spice broke the 50,000 sales barrier in the tiny UK market, and was the second biggest selling ebook in the country, competing – and beating – names we used to idolize.

Sugar & Spice went on to break the 100,000 sales barrier in late summer, and despite an Amazon glitch with the buying links that saw the book literally disappear from Amazon for almost a month, the book continues to sell well today, a year on.

And we continued to send out rejection letters, to both agents and publishers. Not because we had suddenly become anti-agent or anti-trad publisher, but because what they offered would have been a backward step.

When we hit #2 on Kindle UK with 50k sales the almighty Trident Media Group, one of the biggest agencies on the planet, came cold-calling.  Months earlier we couldn’t get an agent to give us the time of day. Now New York’s finest were coming to us! Could this be our big break in the American market?

Sadly not.

In fact their representative had not even read the book, and when they finally did she wanted so many changes (to a book that by now had sold 60,000 and was still topping the charts!) it would have been unrecognizable. And this just to get them to approach a publisher, let alone whatever changes the publisher might demand.

When the Trident agent then told us we had to withhold release of our new Rose Red crime thriller series until after they had approved it – this without us ever having signed a contract with TMG – we realized this and many other agents were living in some fantasy past world where writers were nothing more than an irritation in their all-important lives. When writers had no other options.

While all this was going on we were also being approached by overseas agents and publishers. We let slip the name of one Turkish agent in telephone conversation and the next day Trident – with whom we had no agreement whatsoever – had contacted them to tell them TMG were running the show. Six months on Trident have yet to tell the Turkish agency that TMG are not, and never have been, our representatives. Shame on you, Trident Media Group.

Other agency and publisher offers followed, with contracts ranging from merely unreasonable to downright despicable.

Then along came an offer from France that immediately captured our interest.

For starters, they had actually read the book! Nothing can be more instructive about an agent’s or publisher’s interest in you than they never having read the book they seek to represent / publish. Yet here was a French publisher interested in the Sugar & Spice story, not the Amazon ranking.

So we moved to the next stage, to discuss T&Cs. Here to stress how important it is for all writers to understand that the true value of any deal is not in how much you get out of it, but how much you lose in the detail.

Sure, that glitzy NY agency spiel or the big-dollar advance offered may be tempting. But at what cost to your integrity and future freedom as a writer?

Trident told us (from the very first phone conversation they were dictating terms like they owned us!) our projects list of future books was “just silly”. We could only write crime thrillers for “the next three years”. Our urban dark fantasy, trilogy? Not a chance. Our YA boarding school series, St. Mallory’s? Forget it. Our China Town chicklit mystery series? Go stand in the corner for using foul language. Chicklit doesn’t sell! As for non-fiction… Trident’s rep almost jumped down the phone and grabbed up by the neck to shake sense into us.

And as we looked at other publishers’ and agents’ contracts it became clear many were downright predatory. Non-compete conditions. Exclusivity. World rights despite they having no interest in anything outside the US/UK market. Loss of editorial control. Ridiculous advances and then a timetable to publication that made us wonder if we’d live long enough to see the first edition. Almost every clause was one-sided, and not in favour of the author.

So when we were approached by this publisher in France we were wary. We loved their enthusiasm and personal approach, but Trident, and many others before and since, have been enthusiastic and friendly, until the contract came up. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the contract.

So we went through it with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, exchanged questions, asked for revisions, made suggestions, and discussed the whole deal on equal terms.

And when we were quite satisfied, we signed.

As is standard in such contracts there is a confidentiality clause which prohibits us giving the fine detail. But we’ll try to be as open as possible about what we gained, and more importantly about what we didn’t lose.

First off, these guys moved fast. Within a matter of weeks from first contact with this publisher we had negotiated terms, signed and received the advance.

I know you’re all dying to know how much, but we’re not at liberty to discuss that, or the royalty rates. Suffice to say we entered into this contract having weighed up every pro and con carefully, and we are delighted with the outcome.

The deal is for French language rights only. Yes, there’s now a Kindle France site sitting there, ripe for exploitation. So why not stay completely indie and go it alone we hear you cry?

Well, Sugar & Spice is a 120,000 word novel. The translation costs alone are exorbitant. Would we ever recover the costs of translation? If it took off big-time like in the UK, perhaps, but the French e-reader market is tiny by comparison with the UK. That will change, but when? 2012? 2015? We have no effective way of marketing in France anyway, and certainly no time to do so.

We pondered a percentage deal with a translator, like David Gaughran and Scott Nicholson have done, but it’s a huge amount of work and time to translate a novel of this length, then to see it only available as an ebook in a country where ebooks are so new, and with no effective marketing.

Now our French publisher MA will translate for us, get us into print on Paris book shelves and into hypermarkets, train stations and bookshelves all over France (Mark is ecstatic at that – it’s his favourite European country!), not to mention on amazon.fr. And as MA is widely distributed by a HUGE press over there we can expect a marketing campaign that may not match James Patterson’s, but will certainly be better than we could do on our own.

On top of that we got an advance which, when you consider the deal is for one language and has absolutely no limitations on us selling again and again elsewhere around the world, compares very favourably with what US and UK publishers are typically offering for world rights. And of course we’re not giving away 15% of the advance, or the royalties, to an agent who picked up the phone on our behalf. IP lawyers? No need. This was a straight-forward contract with no hidden clauses or ambiguous language.

Royalty numbers? Again, we’re not at liberty to discuss details, but MA were open to negotiation and we settled on a figure that compares very favourably with what’s being offered elsewhere.

Yes, we could theoretically get 70% from Amazon by going it alone. But that would be digital only. We have no way of getting into any other French ebook outlets, and we have sold precisely four English-language books in France since the Kindle store opened. Now we get to see our book in print in Paris and on Amazon Kindle and other French ebook sites professionally translated and marketed.

The math was simple. Seventy percent of nothing, or a smaller percentage of a very real something.

Throw into the ring the additional problems we’ve had recently with Amazon – where a glitch they admit was their fault just last month cost us literally thousands of sales with no hope of compensation – and it was really a no-brainer.

We lose absolutely nothing, and gain in almost every way. We’ve already banked the advance, and the translation for the print and ebook version of Sugar & Spice in France is on-going, with Paraphilia expected to hit the French market mid-2012. Yes, that soon!

Paraphilia? Just one more benefit of having a French outfit on board to sell in France.

Sugar & Spice translates easily enough, of course, but the traditional British nursery rhyme it draws upon (“sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what little girls are made of” – a reference to the story line of the hunt for a child-killer obsessed with little girls) is pretty much unknown in France, so the title was meaningless and potentially misleading. Something that would never have occurred to us as outsiders.

So are we still indie?

Of course we are!

We are very excited about our partnership for 2012 with this forward-thinking publisher and are currently also discussing other options with them.

But we built our brand up from nothing, with no help from any trad publisher or agent, and we will continue to do so. We will continue to release all our books as indie ebooks first, written how we want them written with covers we choose, published to a timetable that suits us, and priced as we see fit, for maximum royalties. Oh, and without paying 15% to an agent for doing so.

And once we’ve proven the market we can negotiate from strength if and when another agent or publisher comes up with an offer for partial rights to those books. Or indeed for Sugar & Spice itself, which is still open to offers from publishers and agents anywhere that doesn’t speak French!

But don’t even think of trying it on with your boilerplate contract for rookie writers like so many have recently! Take a lesson from MA on mutual respect.

We may not be selling in James Patterson’s numbers, but we think all writers, whatever their status, deserve to be treated with courtesy and respect. And we sure as hell think we’ve earned the right to some.

Saffi & Mark

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by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on December 21, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on December 21, 2011

https://saffinadesforgesblog.com/2011/12/21/official-annoucement-publishing-deal-for-sugar-spice-by-saffina-desforges/

Unwelcome guest: Hurricane Irene

It’s one thing after another these days.

Sometimes, I dread switching on the news.

After Britain was gripped by terrifying riots, the constant fighting in Tripoli whilst Gaddafi continues his murderous grip on Libya, our boys still coming home from Afghanistan dead and injured, hundreds of innocent lives being claimed every day by famine, disease and disaster, I fear the worst every time I log onto the internet.

Today, we send our thoughts and best wishes out to all of our American friends and readers. Hurricane Irene has caused mass mandatory evacuation of low-lying areas in New York and New Jersey. It’s scary stuff.

Stay safe.

Saffi

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by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on August 27, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Saffina Desforges/Stevie Jordan on August 27, 2011

https://saffinadesforgesblog.com/2011/08/27/unwelcome-guest-hurricane-irene/

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