Karl Wiggins's Blog
January 3, 2015
The Writer
Between the innocence of infancy and the recklessness of humanity lies a wild-eyed unsung hero known as a writer. I detest the word author, it sounds far too pretentious. I’m a scribbler. Thanks to the plethora of recent self-published books, there are many misconceptions about the writer’s role and what he is really like.
Writers can be found in bars, in arguments, in bed, in debt, intoxicated and sometimes in their study. They are tall, thin, dark, fair, but never normal. They hate tax returns, sympathy, and the written word presented poorly. A writer’s secret ambition is to be loved by everyone who reads his books. A writer is a psychoanalyst with a battered old copy of Reader’s Digest on the table, Don Quixote on his days off, the saviour of mankind with his back teeth awash and democracy personified when dealing with the authorities, whatever form these ‘authorities’ take.
No one is subjected to so much abuse or wrongly accused so often or misunderstood by so many people as the writer. He keeps the Brazilian coffee plantations, the aspirin factories and the midnight oil manufacturers in business. He writes his truth quietly and never backs down.
On a daily basis he converses with people who are convinced they know more about writing than he will ever know. He can never be right. When he simplifies, he's patronising. When he gets a little technical, he's talking over their heads. Half the people wonder what he does for a living while the other half think they know exactly what he does but are convinced he's doing it wrong! He has more critics than Osama bin Laden, Colonel Gadaffi and President Trump combined.
A writer is a provider when you want something to read and a parasite when he wants paying for the hours he puts in. He has the patience of Job, the honesty of a fool, and the heaven-sent ability to laugh at himself.
At varying stages at the computer the writer will feel irritable, confident, tired, emotional, intelligent, articulate and isolated. Until finally he is weary of the whole human race.
I know because I am one of these great men.
Writers can be found in bars, in arguments, in bed, in debt, intoxicated and sometimes in their study. They are tall, thin, dark, fair, but never normal. They hate tax returns, sympathy, and the written word presented poorly. A writer’s secret ambition is to be loved by everyone who reads his books. A writer is a psychoanalyst with a battered old copy of Reader’s Digest on the table, Don Quixote on his days off, the saviour of mankind with his back teeth awash and democracy personified when dealing with the authorities, whatever form these ‘authorities’ take.
No one is subjected to so much abuse or wrongly accused so often or misunderstood by so many people as the writer. He keeps the Brazilian coffee plantations, the aspirin factories and the midnight oil manufacturers in business. He writes his truth quietly and never backs down.
On a daily basis he converses with people who are convinced they know more about writing than he will ever know. He can never be right. When he simplifies, he's patronising. When he gets a little technical, he's talking over their heads. Half the people wonder what he does for a living while the other half think they know exactly what he does but are convinced he's doing it wrong! He has more critics than Osama bin Laden, Colonel Gadaffi and President Trump combined.
A writer is a provider when you want something to read and a parasite when he wants paying for the hours he puts in. He has the patience of Job, the honesty of a fool, and the heaven-sent ability to laugh at himself.
At varying stages at the computer the writer will feel irritable, confident, tired, emotional, intelligent, articulate and isolated. Until finally he is weary of the whole human race.
I know because I am one of these great men.
December 3, 2014
Does your family take your writing seriously?
In a recent Author Interview I was given chance to discuss the relationship between the writer and his family.
Coincidentally this was brought home to me with a bump last night when I sat my wife down to discuss something with her. We’d had a cracking night out at friends, the banter had been flowing and all in all it was an excellent evening. If you have no banter in your life then your very existence is all the poorer for it.
So I sat Sue down and said I wanted to discuss something with her. She listened with trepidation.
“For the last few months I’ve been a member of this online writers group …..”
“Oh, God!”
“No listen, this is important …..”
“You’re too controversial for them.”
“No I’m not! I’m not! I haven’t argued with anybody. I haven’t spoken a single word about UKIP or even mentioned Nigel Farage at all. I’ve stayed away from religion. I don’t think I even spoke about immigration. I added value to the group. They even made me Author of the Week one week. I promoted another author’s books on there one time instead of my own, and they seemed to like that. I genuinely thought that my diverse sense of humour lightened the mood sometimes when people were getting up their own arse. All in all, they seemed like a really nice crowd.”
“Go on.”
“They’ve booted me out!”
And do you know what, she absolutely pissed herself laughing. She laughed so hard tears rolled down her leg! She was literally rolling on the floor laughing. This is the respect I get. This demonstrates just how seriously a writer’s family takes his writing.
Once she was able to catch her breath she said, “That’s priceless. You must have pissed someone off.”
“I didn’t! I swear. They all seemed like really nice people. There was one horrible cow a few weeks back who disagreed with something I’d said, I can’t remember what it was now, but she got pretty nasty about it. I hope they’ve chucked her out as well. But no, I didn’t, I didn’t say anything to piss anyone off.”
“Karl, love, listen to me, how long have you been a member of groups like this?”
“Ten or twelve years or so I suppose.”
“Then you know full well how precious these bloody writers can get. I don’t know why you bother with them at all. Have you sold any more books since you’ve been a member? Have your book sales gone up.”
“No, they’ve remained the same.”
“Then it’s a waste of bloody time, isn’t it? Why bother with them? They’re probably all vegetarians who stay in at night practicing ‘Bobby Shafto’ on their recorders.”
“Well yeah, I suppose so.
“Let’s face it; you wouldn’t invite any of them to a barbeque, would you?”
“But they’re not all like that. I’ve made some friends, people I’d trust.”
“I’ve no doubt, but they’re the exception, aren’t they? I bet there’s no real banter on these writer’s sites, is there? You, of all people, know full well that banter frustrates the types you find in these writer’s groups because that form of verbal jousting requires both mental agility and precocity, both of which they believe they hold the monopoly on. So they get all precious about it.”
“But the admin staff seemed nice enough.”
“Well, clearly they’re not, are they? Otherwise they wouldn’t have been so unprofessional. They’d have discussed things with you rather than just booting you out with no warning or explanation whatsoever. Have you asked them why they booted you out?”
“Of course, but they’ve all buried their heads in the sand, which is kind of cowardly.”
“There you go then. Karl, my love, when you meet people in person you’re a really good judge of character - except that guy in prison who killed whatsisface, of course - but you really don’t know what these people are like when you meet them online. They come across all respectable, and make every effort to portray that impression but in reality they need to lighten the fuck up!”
She speaks a lot of sense, Sue, I must admit.
Coincidentally this was brought home to me with a bump last night when I sat my wife down to discuss something with her. We’d had a cracking night out at friends, the banter had been flowing and all in all it was an excellent evening. If you have no banter in your life then your very existence is all the poorer for it.
So I sat Sue down and said I wanted to discuss something with her. She listened with trepidation.
“For the last few months I’ve been a member of this online writers group …..”
“Oh, God!”
“No listen, this is important …..”
“You’re too controversial for them.”
“No I’m not! I’m not! I haven’t argued with anybody. I haven’t spoken a single word about UKIP or even mentioned Nigel Farage at all. I’ve stayed away from religion. I don’t think I even spoke about immigration. I added value to the group. They even made me Author of the Week one week. I promoted another author’s books on there one time instead of my own, and they seemed to like that. I genuinely thought that my diverse sense of humour lightened the mood sometimes when people were getting up their own arse. All in all, they seemed like a really nice crowd.”
“Go on.”
“They’ve booted me out!”
And do you know what, she absolutely pissed herself laughing. She laughed so hard tears rolled down her leg! She was literally rolling on the floor laughing. This is the respect I get. This demonstrates just how seriously a writer’s family takes his writing.
Once she was able to catch her breath she said, “That’s priceless. You must have pissed someone off.”
“I didn’t! I swear. They all seemed like really nice people. There was one horrible cow a few weeks back who disagreed with something I’d said, I can’t remember what it was now, but she got pretty nasty about it. I hope they’ve chucked her out as well. But no, I didn’t, I didn’t say anything to piss anyone off.”
“Karl, love, listen to me, how long have you been a member of groups like this?”
“Ten or twelve years or so I suppose.”
“Then you know full well how precious these bloody writers can get. I don’t know why you bother with them at all. Have you sold any more books since you’ve been a member? Have your book sales gone up.”
“No, they’ve remained the same.”
“Then it’s a waste of bloody time, isn’t it? Why bother with them? They’re probably all vegetarians who stay in at night practicing ‘Bobby Shafto’ on their recorders.”
“Well yeah, I suppose so.
“Let’s face it; you wouldn’t invite any of them to a barbeque, would you?”
“But they’re not all like that. I’ve made some friends, people I’d trust.”
“I’ve no doubt, but they’re the exception, aren’t they? I bet there’s no real banter on these writer’s sites, is there? You, of all people, know full well that banter frustrates the types you find in these writer’s groups because that form of verbal jousting requires both mental agility and precocity, both of which they believe they hold the monopoly on. So they get all precious about it.”
“But the admin staff seemed nice enough.”
“Well, clearly they’re not, are they? Otherwise they wouldn’t have been so unprofessional. They’d have discussed things with you rather than just booting you out with no warning or explanation whatsoever. Have you asked them why they booted you out?”
“Of course, but they’ve all buried their heads in the sand, which is kind of cowardly.”
“There you go then. Karl, my love, when you meet people in person you’re a really good judge of character - except that guy in prison who killed whatsisface, of course - but you really don’t know what these people are like when you meet them online. They come across all respectable, and make every effort to portray that impression but in reality they need to lighten the fuck up!”
She speaks a lot of sense, Sue, I must admit.
August 5, 2014
Does Twitter Help Sell Books?
A little while ago I carried out an experiment and any authors reading this are going to find it VERY INTERESTING! Stay with me here, because THE FIGURES WILL ASTOUND YOU!
You see I’ve recently been wondering if Twitter really helps to sell books, and I’m not so sure it does. I think it’s great for networking, and that’s vitally important in this ever-growing community of Indie authors that didn’t really exist five years ago. Oh I know a huge number of us self-published through Print on Demand and so forth (and some may even be old enough to remember Vanity Publishing), but right now Indie publishing is exploding like no other time in history.
So Twitter is possibly one of the best mediums for networking. And it’s also brilliant for ‘platforming.’ In theory, through platforming readers are exposed to our books more often than those they leave ‘on the shelf.’
First of all HUGE respect to all those scribblers (and others trades) who spend time every evening re-tweeting various author’s postings. And a big thank you to anyone who’s ever put in time re-tweeting my own. I honestly try to reciprocate, but we all know what it’s like to get thrown into ‘Twitter Jail’ just as we’re hoping to wrap it all up for the evening.
However, I suspect that all we accomplish by tweeting each other’s tweets, if that’s the correct terminology, is that the whole thing just goes round and round and round and never really reaches the decision maker; i.e. the reader.
Well anyone can count how many tweets they tweeted, compare it to how many books they sold and come up with a figure. But that’s bollocks! I wanted indisputable proof.
So this is what I did. I have a book promotion video on YouTube (you can find it on my home page on Goodreads) that receives very good response every time someone views it, but that’s not very many people. So on a Tuesday night at mid-night I made a note of the number of people who’d viewed it to date. Then on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I carried on re-tweeting other authors’ work as usual, but the only thing I promoted for myself is this YouTube video. For 3½ days this is all I did on Twitter, tweeting the same video in different formats and of course continuing to re-tweet other writers. And I kept a close eye on the results.
I now know exactly who’s re-tweeted it and because I can look and see how many followers each of these people have I also know exactly how many people this video has been re-tweeted to. Whether they’ve picked up on it or not, who knows? But that’s not the point of the exercise.
So here we go; Over a period of 84 hours my YouTube video was tweeted to 470,117 people, not far off half a million. And out of those 470,117 people who received this tweet, 26 of them have actually clicked on the link.
To put that into perspective 0.005% of people receiving the tweet about my YouTube book promotion video have actually opened it and had a look at it! That means that 99.995% of people receiving this tweet have either ignored it, which is more than likely, or had the decency to re-tweet it to their own followers, but without actually looking at themselves.
And in those 3½ days I sold one book. (I actually sold three others, but they’re not the subject of the YouTube video)
The statisticians amongst you may now be saying that some people may have received that tweet but from different twitter users. True, but some people have also re-tweeted it more than once, at different times of the day, so the figures balance each other out.
The point I’m making here is that I have to reach almost half a million people on Twitter to sell one single book. And considering I earn about £1 for every book sold, that’s a lot of hard work. If I want to sell 100 books, and earn myself £100, my tweets have to reach over 47 million people worldwide!
Does Twitter help sell books? Yeah, I’d say so, but this is a measure of the amount of hard graft that has to be put in.
You see I’ve recently been wondering if Twitter really helps to sell books, and I’m not so sure it does. I think it’s great for networking, and that’s vitally important in this ever-growing community of Indie authors that didn’t really exist five years ago. Oh I know a huge number of us self-published through Print on Demand and so forth (and some may even be old enough to remember Vanity Publishing), but right now Indie publishing is exploding like no other time in history.
So Twitter is possibly one of the best mediums for networking. And it’s also brilliant for ‘platforming.’ In theory, through platforming readers are exposed to our books more often than those they leave ‘on the shelf.’
First of all HUGE respect to all those scribblers (and others trades) who spend time every evening re-tweeting various author’s postings. And a big thank you to anyone who’s ever put in time re-tweeting my own. I honestly try to reciprocate, but we all know what it’s like to get thrown into ‘Twitter Jail’ just as we’re hoping to wrap it all up for the evening.
However, I suspect that all we accomplish by tweeting each other’s tweets, if that’s the correct terminology, is that the whole thing just goes round and round and round and never really reaches the decision maker; i.e. the reader.
Well anyone can count how many tweets they tweeted, compare it to how many books they sold and come up with a figure. But that’s bollocks! I wanted indisputable proof.
So this is what I did. I have a book promotion video on YouTube (you can find it on my home page on Goodreads) that receives very good response every time someone views it, but that’s not very many people. So on a Tuesday night at mid-night I made a note of the number of people who’d viewed it to date. Then on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I carried on re-tweeting other authors’ work as usual, but the only thing I promoted for myself is this YouTube video. For 3½ days this is all I did on Twitter, tweeting the same video in different formats and of course continuing to re-tweet other writers. And I kept a close eye on the results.
I now know exactly who’s re-tweeted it and because I can look and see how many followers each of these people have I also know exactly how many people this video has been re-tweeted to. Whether they’ve picked up on it or not, who knows? But that’s not the point of the exercise.
So here we go; Over a period of 84 hours my YouTube video was tweeted to 470,117 people, not far off half a million. And out of those 470,117 people who received this tweet, 26 of them have actually clicked on the link.
To put that into perspective 0.005% of people receiving the tweet about my YouTube book promotion video have actually opened it and had a look at it! That means that 99.995% of people receiving this tweet have either ignored it, which is more than likely, or had the decency to re-tweet it to their own followers, but without actually looking at themselves.
And in those 3½ days I sold one book. (I actually sold three others, but they’re not the subject of the YouTube video)
The statisticians amongst you may now be saying that some people may have received that tweet but from different twitter users. True, but some people have also re-tweeted it more than once, at different times of the day, so the figures balance each other out.
The point I’m making here is that I have to reach almost half a million people on Twitter to sell one single book. And considering I earn about £1 for every book sold, that’s a lot of hard work. If I want to sell 100 books, and earn myself £100, my tweets have to reach over 47 million people worldwide!
Does Twitter help sell books? Yeah, I’d say so, but this is a measure of the amount of hard graft that has to be put in.
July 30, 2014
Free Giveaways - Two Sides of the Same Coin
Now here’s a funny thing. I’m a humourist and raconteur and a while ago I promoted my book ‘GRIT – The Banter and Brutality of the Late-Night Cab Driver’ on a five-day freebie. I had just under 1000 free downloads during the five-day period, which is a record for me but a bit disappointing because my target was somewhere closer to 2000.
And then someone said to me, “But you don’t make any money out of that?” And this, believe it or not, was a person who runs her own business and sells her own products, so you’d think she’d be a bit more switched on, wouldn’t you? But clearly she’s not clued up on the advantages of FREE e-advertising, and she obviously doesn’t realise that I will in fact make money out of it.
Last time I had a freebie the retweets and Facebook shares were ‘out there’ for at least another month. I know this, because book sales went up substantially during that period. And this time I was expecting better results. I know already, of course, how many mini-cab and taxi firms have re-tweeted my promotion or shared it on Facebook. And if I could be bothered – which I can’t - I could work out exactly how many people those tweets etc. went out to.
Leaving aside the supporting authors, writers, bloggers, book reviewers etc. just imagine the couple of dozen cab drivers who re-tweeted me to their thousands of followers or people who ‘like’ their Facebook pages. The book’s not free anymore, but for the following month cab drivers would have been checking it out, re-tweeting it themselves, finding out it now costs £0.99p on Amazon, thinking to themselves, “I’ve never heard of Karl Wiggins. It’s probably crap, but for £0.99p I’ve nothing to lose really,” and clicking on ‘Buy Now.’
It’s a numbers game of course, and it’s a nice thought that it will reach hundreds of thousands of people, but I’m pragmatic enough to understand that only a small percentage of those will act on it.
So where would you start trying to explain the advantages of a loss-leader to someone, even a businesses person, who clearly missed that class in ‘Business Studies’ at school? First of all, a free giveaway isn’t a loss-leader at all, is it? A loss-leader is when a product’s sold below market value in order to stimulate sales of a more profitable product. In other words the vendor makes a ‘loss’ on one product but that ‘leads’ to more sales of another product.
Well I haven’t made a loss on those 1000 books, have I? And anyone who thinks I have clearly doesn’t understand e-publishing. Most vendors have to buy their product in the first place. If they give it away for free they’re making a loss. Thus the obtuse statement, “But you didn’t make any money out of those books, did you?”
This particular person has to fork out for product, petrol, phone bills, stationary, equipment hire, wear & tear on vehicle, advertising, marketing and so on. They can’t afford to give anything away. The thought of giving a product away would no doubt bring them out in a cold sweat. What they fail to understand is that my product doesn’t cost me a penny. It’s extremely time-consuming to write a book, and that’s another matter, but to market an e-book doesn’t cost me a single penny.
So I’ve now got 1000 people reading the book who otherwise would probably never have done so. Which this sole trader doesn’t have, do they? After one week’s work they haven’t exactly attracted 1000 new customers to their business.
“But,” I hear again, “They’re reading it for FREE!! What good is that to you in the long run except for selling a few more books next month?”
DUUHHH!! Okay, to clarify, I’ve attracted 1000 new people to my business without any advertising costs whatsoever. And don’t be misled into thinking they’re one-time buyers, but more about that later. It really is only e-businesses that spend no money on advertising. Most sole traders have a website, of course, but they still use Yellow Pages, local newspapers, pamphlets, business cards and so on. Larger businesses – traditional publishers for instance – have print runs, premises, cleaning, electricity, water & gas, employee costs (salaries, health plans, pensions etc.), company cars and of course advertising. Not looking like such a turnip now, am I?
And are my 1000 new customers just one-time buyers? Let’s hope not. That depends on the quality of my writing. I'm very much aware that I have an inappropriate sense of humour that isn’t to everyone’s taste, and that not everyone ‘gets’ me. And I’m alright with that, in fact I take it as a compliment because if all I wrote about was roses on postcards and kittens and stuff like that then I’m not being controversial enough.
Most of my writing is my lifestyle observations, making every attempt to bring to life all the not-so-ordinary people that cross my path, even if most of them break my balls. This does, however, have the affect that a lot of people smile, laugh or ‘wet their knickers,’ and either way you look at it that’s got to be a success!
So are my 1000 new customers just one-time buyers? Well not if they enjoy the book. Readers naturally search out other books by a writer they like, so if they enjoy the first book they’ll purchase others. And just as importantly they’ll give good reviews. Not all readers understand how important a review is to a struggling scribbler, but I try and review everything I’ve read. Good reviews lead other people to purchase the book. Even better if they can establish a relationship with me. Readers love to communicate with writers. And from my point of view I’m hugely appreciative that they care enough to contact me. I will always reply to tweets, email correspondence or contacts through Facebook.
Never before have readers been so willing to take a chance on an unknown author. They’ve spent money on their Kindle or Nook or I pad or whatever and they’re anxious to load it up. They can spend £10 on a traditional author’s book or £0.99p on mine. For the first time in history that traditional author now has to prove he’s ten times better than me. By offering books for free I’m building a following one contact at a time. And guess what? More and more people are buying Kindles!
HOWEVER, playing devil’s advocate for a minute and looking at the other side of the coin, allow me to tell you a little story. You see I lived on the Algarve for four years, and every year all the bar owners would get together – stay with me because THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO ALL OF US – and agree amongst themselves on such issues as standards for touting (no one would tout outside someone else’s bar), the price of beer and so on.
For instance, way back then the price of a large beer was 200 escudos. This is before the Euro, you’ll remember. Everyone would agree on this, but I’m sure you can guess what always happened next? Before you knew it, there was a bar knocking out large beers for 180 escudos, or another bar offering free biscuits with a cup of tea. By the end of the season you’d find bars selling large beers in Happy Hour for 100 scuds, and then only raising the price to 150 when it was time for karaoke.
And guess what? The only person who won was the punter, the Billy Bunter, the tourist, the holidaymaker or the grokel, whatever you want to call him. Not the bar owners. They didn’t win. They all ended up competing with each other every year to fill their own bars with tourists who actually threw precious little of their hard-earned holiday savings over the jump.
But that wasn’t the real problem – PLEASE STAY WITH ME, THIS IS REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU AND ME. The real problem was that every year the breweries put up the price of a barrel of beer. In the four years I lived there I saw it go up from 2000 escudos to over 6000 escudos (Heaven knows what it is now!) but the bar owners couldn’t put up the price of a large beer because they’d price themselves out of the market. Their bar would be empty. Profits dwindled to such an extent that it became really, really hard for them to earn enough money in that short four-month summer window from June to September to last the whole year round.
But it was to get worse – AND THIS WHERE YOU AND I COME IN – for you know what happened next? More and more Johnny-come-latelies arrived to open bars on the strip. They lacked the experience, they didn’t know what they were getting into, THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HARD WORK IT COULD BE OR HOW TIME-CONSUMING, but they were willing to do anything it took to entice punters into their own bars. They didn’t even really care about profits. They were in the sunshine and that was all that mattered.
Does this familiar? It should!
What was once a nice strip with about 20 bars now has over 100. It is horrible! Teenagers drinking cheap alco-pops, puking up and fighting in the street. Nicer people have moved out, retired or bought quiet little bars inland. They don’t make any money, of course, but they can’t compete with the Strip.
Now I hope you’ve stayed with me so far because those of you who are astute enough will have realised that I can at times, if nothing else, be a master of the metaphor, because this is exactly the same scenario that is happening to Indie authors right now. And I have a very serious concern about it.
Before I go on allow me to say that by cogitating over what I’m about to write I’m opening myself up to accusations of hypocrisy, because I have been in the past just as much a part of the problem as everybody else, and I admit that.
It’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve been able to stick two fingers up at the publishing houses and the vanity publishers, who’ve had things their own way for far too long. Do you want to hear my war stories concerning Print on Demand and rip-offs? I didn’t think so, for we can all tell similar stories.
But nowadays you and I are in charge. We write the books, we publish them, we have no one demanding to edit our very own style out of our writing, and we promote them.
HMV went bust a year ago after 92 years, with the loss of 239 stores and 4350 jobs. The reason; digital downloads.
There is really now no place for the high street retailer - records or books. Why would anyone bother to get dressed, drive downtown, find a parking space, walk to the book store, search through all the books and choose one to read when the much simpler option is to fire up your Kindle (still in your jimmy-jams), buy the book and be reading it by the time you've finished your second cup of coffee?
The only thing that keeps traditional publishers from realising they're a dying breed is nothing but their own bloody arrogance!
Their comeuppance is well overdue.
But here’s my concern, and it really troubles me. Just like the bars in Portugal, we as writers have now been forced into the situation whereby we’re all competing with each, and we’re doing that by knocking down our prices. Now when I say competing, that takes absolutely nothing away from the very supportive nature that I’m absolutely convinced the Indie author community has towards each other. All of us totally understand the hard work we each put in writing our books, and the harder work it takes to promote them. But once we’ve written them, we want people to read them, and it would be nice to make a little bit of ‘folding’ out of it, wouldn’t it?
So we knock the prices down, giving five-day giveaways in our own version of Happy hour, yet the only person who wins is the punter, who in this case is the reader.
We’ve reached the stage whereby people are now trawling Amazon looking for free books. There are even companies that list them!!!!
And, just like the Algarve, in the next year or so there will be so many Indie authors on Amazon, what chance will we have? Readers will only download free books! Someone will probably come up with a clever geeky-type thing that says, “Notify me when this book is free.”
I don’t know the answer to this, but if you spend a year writing your book, why should you give your hard work away for free?
I am truly concerned about what will happen in the long run. What’s the next step? Giving books away for free and then selling advertising space around those books? Maybe we’ll end up writing books just as a loss-leader to sell advertising.
Depressing, isn’t it?
It would be no good campaigning for Amazon and the like to cease offering books for free because they wouldn’t. They want to sell Kindles.
I just don’t know where we, as writers, will be in five years’ time. With more and more authors writing books and offering them for free there will be no reason whatsoever for a reader to pay anything at all to download a copy.
I do know one thing though. If this issue is not addressed – by Amazon ideally – the whole self-publishing industry will go into free-fall and eventually implode.
The only people who can sort this are Amazon. The traditional publishers may well be right now sitting on the side-lines, biding their time, waiting for the whole self-publishing industry to cave-in. At which stage they will take over again. Amazon won't care, of course, because they'll continue selling Kindles, only book prices will go through the roof, and they'll make even more commission!
By offering our books for free not only are we devaluing our product but we’re forcing each other to compete. And readers aren’t stupid. They realise what’s happening. I have a friend who doesn’t pay for anything if she can help it. She doesn’t pay to download music, films or books, but can you blame her?
It isn’t just this industry or the bars on the Algarve that face this problem. The mini-cab industry is being taking over by foreign migrants who’ll take, say, a £55 airport run and offer it for just £35 with the return for free. How can anyone compete against that?
In a recession this is quite possibly a global issue, but all authors and writers want to do is earn a little bit of cash from our writing. And if this isn’t sorted soon that may very well become an impossibility.
I will never, ever offer one of my books for free. If I do please feel free to come to my house en masse, build some stocks in the driveway and have all the neighbours throw tomatoes (in the can) at me. Sue will give you a warm welcome. In fact, she’ll probably help!
And then someone said to me, “But you don’t make any money out of that?” And this, believe it or not, was a person who runs her own business and sells her own products, so you’d think she’d be a bit more switched on, wouldn’t you? But clearly she’s not clued up on the advantages of FREE e-advertising, and she obviously doesn’t realise that I will in fact make money out of it.
Last time I had a freebie the retweets and Facebook shares were ‘out there’ for at least another month. I know this, because book sales went up substantially during that period. And this time I was expecting better results. I know already, of course, how many mini-cab and taxi firms have re-tweeted my promotion or shared it on Facebook. And if I could be bothered – which I can’t - I could work out exactly how many people those tweets etc. went out to.
Leaving aside the supporting authors, writers, bloggers, book reviewers etc. just imagine the couple of dozen cab drivers who re-tweeted me to their thousands of followers or people who ‘like’ their Facebook pages. The book’s not free anymore, but for the following month cab drivers would have been checking it out, re-tweeting it themselves, finding out it now costs £0.99p on Amazon, thinking to themselves, “I’ve never heard of Karl Wiggins. It’s probably crap, but for £0.99p I’ve nothing to lose really,” and clicking on ‘Buy Now.’
It’s a numbers game of course, and it’s a nice thought that it will reach hundreds of thousands of people, but I’m pragmatic enough to understand that only a small percentage of those will act on it.
So where would you start trying to explain the advantages of a loss-leader to someone, even a businesses person, who clearly missed that class in ‘Business Studies’ at school? First of all, a free giveaway isn’t a loss-leader at all, is it? A loss-leader is when a product’s sold below market value in order to stimulate sales of a more profitable product. In other words the vendor makes a ‘loss’ on one product but that ‘leads’ to more sales of another product.
Well I haven’t made a loss on those 1000 books, have I? And anyone who thinks I have clearly doesn’t understand e-publishing. Most vendors have to buy their product in the first place. If they give it away for free they’re making a loss. Thus the obtuse statement, “But you didn’t make any money out of those books, did you?”
This particular person has to fork out for product, petrol, phone bills, stationary, equipment hire, wear & tear on vehicle, advertising, marketing and so on. They can’t afford to give anything away. The thought of giving a product away would no doubt bring them out in a cold sweat. What they fail to understand is that my product doesn’t cost me a penny. It’s extremely time-consuming to write a book, and that’s another matter, but to market an e-book doesn’t cost me a single penny.
So I’ve now got 1000 people reading the book who otherwise would probably never have done so. Which this sole trader doesn’t have, do they? After one week’s work they haven’t exactly attracted 1000 new customers to their business.
“But,” I hear again, “They’re reading it for FREE!! What good is that to you in the long run except for selling a few more books next month?”
DUUHHH!! Okay, to clarify, I’ve attracted 1000 new people to my business without any advertising costs whatsoever. And don’t be misled into thinking they’re one-time buyers, but more about that later. It really is only e-businesses that spend no money on advertising. Most sole traders have a website, of course, but they still use Yellow Pages, local newspapers, pamphlets, business cards and so on. Larger businesses – traditional publishers for instance – have print runs, premises, cleaning, electricity, water & gas, employee costs (salaries, health plans, pensions etc.), company cars and of course advertising. Not looking like such a turnip now, am I?
And are my 1000 new customers just one-time buyers? Let’s hope not. That depends on the quality of my writing. I'm very much aware that I have an inappropriate sense of humour that isn’t to everyone’s taste, and that not everyone ‘gets’ me. And I’m alright with that, in fact I take it as a compliment because if all I wrote about was roses on postcards and kittens and stuff like that then I’m not being controversial enough.
Most of my writing is my lifestyle observations, making every attempt to bring to life all the not-so-ordinary people that cross my path, even if most of them break my balls. This does, however, have the affect that a lot of people smile, laugh or ‘wet their knickers,’ and either way you look at it that’s got to be a success!
So are my 1000 new customers just one-time buyers? Well not if they enjoy the book. Readers naturally search out other books by a writer they like, so if they enjoy the first book they’ll purchase others. And just as importantly they’ll give good reviews. Not all readers understand how important a review is to a struggling scribbler, but I try and review everything I’ve read. Good reviews lead other people to purchase the book. Even better if they can establish a relationship with me. Readers love to communicate with writers. And from my point of view I’m hugely appreciative that they care enough to contact me. I will always reply to tweets, email correspondence or contacts through Facebook.
Never before have readers been so willing to take a chance on an unknown author. They’ve spent money on their Kindle or Nook or I pad or whatever and they’re anxious to load it up. They can spend £10 on a traditional author’s book or £0.99p on mine. For the first time in history that traditional author now has to prove he’s ten times better than me. By offering books for free I’m building a following one contact at a time. And guess what? More and more people are buying Kindles!
HOWEVER, playing devil’s advocate for a minute and looking at the other side of the coin, allow me to tell you a little story. You see I lived on the Algarve for four years, and every year all the bar owners would get together – stay with me because THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO ALL OF US – and agree amongst themselves on such issues as standards for touting (no one would tout outside someone else’s bar), the price of beer and so on.
For instance, way back then the price of a large beer was 200 escudos. This is before the Euro, you’ll remember. Everyone would agree on this, but I’m sure you can guess what always happened next? Before you knew it, there was a bar knocking out large beers for 180 escudos, or another bar offering free biscuits with a cup of tea. By the end of the season you’d find bars selling large beers in Happy Hour for 100 scuds, and then only raising the price to 150 when it was time for karaoke.
And guess what? The only person who won was the punter, the Billy Bunter, the tourist, the holidaymaker or the grokel, whatever you want to call him. Not the bar owners. They didn’t win. They all ended up competing with each other every year to fill their own bars with tourists who actually threw precious little of their hard-earned holiday savings over the jump.
But that wasn’t the real problem – PLEASE STAY WITH ME, THIS IS REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU AND ME. The real problem was that every year the breweries put up the price of a barrel of beer. In the four years I lived there I saw it go up from 2000 escudos to over 6000 escudos (Heaven knows what it is now!) but the bar owners couldn’t put up the price of a large beer because they’d price themselves out of the market. Their bar would be empty. Profits dwindled to such an extent that it became really, really hard for them to earn enough money in that short four-month summer window from June to September to last the whole year round.
But it was to get worse – AND THIS WHERE YOU AND I COME IN – for you know what happened next? More and more Johnny-come-latelies arrived to open bars on the strip. They lacked the experience, they didn’t know what they were getting into, THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HARD WORK IT COULD BE OR HOW TIME-CONSUMING, but they were willing to do anything it took to entice punters into their own bars. They didn’t even really care about profits. They were in the sunshine and that was all that mattered.
Does this familiar? It should!
What was once a nice strip with about 20 bars now has over 100. It is horrible! Teenagers drinking cheap alco-pops, puking up and fighting in the street. Nicer people have moved out, retired or bought quiet little bars inland. They don’t make any money, of course, but they can’t compete with the Strip.
Now I hope you’ve stayed with me so far because those of you who are astute enough will have realised that I can at times, if nothing else, be a master of the metaphor, because this is exactly the same scenario that is happening to Indie authors right now. And I have a very serious concern about it.
Before I go on allow me to say that by cogitating over what I’m about to write I’m opening myself up to accusations of hypocrisy, because I have been in the past just as much a part of the problem as everybody else, and I admit that.
It’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve been able to stick two fingers up at the publishing houses and the vanity publishers, who’ve had things their own way for far too long. Do you want to hear my war stories concerning Print on Demand and rip-offs? I didn’t think so, for we can all tell similar stories.
But nowadays you and I are in charge. We write the books, we publish them, we have no one demanding to edit our very own style out of our writing, and we promote them.
HMV went bust a year ago after 92 years, with the loss of 239 stores and 4350 jobs. The reason; digital downloads.
There is really now no place for the high street retailer - records or books. Why would anyone bother to get dressed, drive downtown, find a parking space, walk to the book store, search through all the books and choose one to read when the much simpler option is to fire up your Kindle (still in your jimmy-jams), buy the book and be reading it by the time you've finished your second cup of coffee?
The only thing that keeps traditional publishers from realising they're a dying breed is nothing but their own bloody arrogance!
Their comeuppance is well overdue.
But here’s my concern, and it really troubles me. Just like the bars in Portugal, we as writers have now been forced into the situation whereby we’re all competing with each, and we’re doing that by knocking down our prices. Now when I say competing, that takes absolutely nothing away from the very supportive nature that I’m absolutely convinced the Indie author community has towards each other. All of us totally understand the hard work we each put in writing our books, and the harder work it takes to promote them. But once we’ve written them, we want people to read them, and it would be nice to make a little bit of ‘folding’ out of it, wouldn’t it?
So we knock the prices down, giving five-day giveaways in our own version of Happy hour, yet the only person who wins is the punter, who in this case is the reader.
We’ve reached the stage whereby people are now trawling Amazon looking for free books. There are even companies that list them!!!!
And, just like the Algarve, in the next year or so there will be so many Indie authors on Amazon, what chance will we have? Readers will only download free books! Someone will probably come up with a clever geeky-type thing that says, “Notify me when this book is free.”
I don’t know the answer to this, but if you spend a year writing your book, why should you give your hard work away for free?
I am truly concerned about what will happen in the long run. What’s the next step? Giving books away for free and then selling advertising space around those books? Maybe we’ll end up writing books just as a loss-leader to sell advertising.
Depressing, isn’t it?
It would be no good campaigning for Amazon and the like to cease offering books for free because they wouldn’t. They want to sell Kindles.
I just don’t know where we, as writers, will be in five years’ time. With more and more authors writing books and offering them for free there will be no reason whatsoever for a reader to pay anything at all to download a copy.
I do know one thing though. If this issue is not addressed – by Amazon ideally – the whole self-publishing industry will go into free-fall and eventually implode.
The only people who can sort this are Amazon. The traditional publishers may well be right now sitting on the side-lines, biding their time, waiting for the whole self-publishing industry to cave-in. At which stage they will take over again. Amazon won't care, of course, because they'll continue selling Kindles, only book prices will go through the roof, and they'll make even more commission!
By offering our books for free not only are we devaluing our product but we’re forcing each other to compete. And readers aren’t stupid. They realise what’s happening. I have a friend who doesn’t pay for anything if she can help it. She doesn’t pay to download music, films or books, but can you blame her?
It isn’t just this industry or the bars on the Algarve that face this problem. The mini-cab industry is being taking over by foreign migrants who’ll take, say, a £55 airport run and offer it for just £35 with the return for free. How can anyone compete against that?
In a recession this is quite possibly a global issue, but all authors and writers want to do is earn a little bit of cash from our writing. And if this isn’t sorted soon that may very well become an impossibility.
I will never, ever offer one of my books for free. If I do please feel free to come to my house en masse, build some stocks in the driveway and have all the neighbours throw tomatoes (in the can) at me. Sue will give you a warm welcome. In fact, she’ll probably help!
June 21, 2014
Author Interview
What inspired you to write your latest novel?
Hahahaha, you know full well I don’t answer questions like that. I don’t do the standard Author Interview questions like Do you have a specific writing style? How did you come up with the title? What books have most influenced you? What book are you reading now? Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Hang on; I’ll answer that last one about a message in my writing. First of all I don’t write novels. Huge respect to all the writers out there for their outstanding, far-fetched, comical, sometimes brutal, often ludicrous and downright fab imaginations. I have never, ever written fiction in my life because I completely lack the artistry, yet there are so many writers who allow their imaginations to fly, build a plot, build a sub-plot and continue to write superb story lines in that fashion.
All I’ve ever written is from my observations of life. I’m a piss-taker, which doesn’t necessarily make for a great writer, but it’s what I do. I don’t take my subject matter too seriously, and have little patience for anyone who does. I’m well aware that not everybody ‘gets’ me, but those that don’t can read the next guy’s stuff. I have no problem with that.
We walk a fine line, us writers, living in fear and dread that we might upset someone. And we’re often judged as people by what we write, even though we may be simply playing with words. Critics judge the author as opposed to judging what he writes, which is about as silly as judging the persona of a chef after eating something he’s cooked. I once wrote a poem about a rape, yet that doesn’t mean I’m a rapist. It just means I wrote a poem about a rape.
I’m going off track here, haven’t I? I tend to do that a lot. I’m supposed to be writing about any message in my writing and instead I’ve found myself rambling on about what a ‘fine line us writers walk.’ Christ, where did that line come from?
Okay, is there a message in my writing? Well yeah, there is. My goal, my life’s ambition if you like, is to give direction to comedy, purpose to satire. And this is probably why I write the way I do, in order to use self-deprecating, piss-taking humour to bring to the fore situations that just don’t stack up. To demonstrate that serious issues can be approached with humour.
Embarrassingly, a number of the reviews for my books seem to involve people losing control of their bladder; “Anyone who is a bit saucy, very fond of boobies and doesn’t mind peeing slightly when they laugh too hard, this is the book for you!” “Best not to read this book on the train if you have a full bladder because by the end of your journey you will have a damp patch in an embarrassing place.” “I have to admit that I wet myself twice while reading it but this may in part have been due to my age and a couple of bottles of a fine St. Emilion,” “Due to the laughter you owe my secretary one clean pair of knickers.”
Two reviewers have even suggested I should tour as a stand-up comedian; “I found myself laughing out-loud and even sharing segments with my spouse ….. I think Karl could tour as a stand-up comedian,” “Mr Wiggins has views on life that are expressed in a manner worthy of any stand-up comedian.”
So my scribblings do seem to raise a smile and a chuckle, and either way you look at it, that has to be a good thing. Hardly any subject is taboo to the Englishman when he’s laughing, and this often seems insensitive to other cultures, but the bedrock of the British sense of humour is a strong sense of sarcasm and self-deprecation. The British can be very passionate – and if you doubt that try going to a football match – but that passion is often hidden deep in our humour so that other nationals fail to not only recognise the deadpan delivery and are never too sure if they’ve been involved in a serious conversation or just a little bit of friendly banter. Having said that my style of writing is now appealing more and more to the American market.
So what inspired you to write your latest novel?
You! You inspired me to write my latest novel. My son, Kai, and I were in the local Morrison’s. Kai was planning on cooking fajitas for dinner, Sue was out with the girls and we needed to buy some fajita wraps. Morrison’s is HUGE so it was always going to be a challenge. I asked a girl packing shelves but as Morrison’s employees tend to look after just one section they get a little confused when you ask about something outside of their comfort zone. She pointed towards another bloke in a snazzy Morrison’s green jacket and said, “Ask him, he works in wines & spirits.”
I looked at Kai who raised his eyebrows in a “Are you really sure you want to go this route” kind of look, but as it seemed like the next clue in our ‘task for the day’ we wandered over to the wines & spirits bloke and asked him where we could find fajita wraps, or burrito wraps or enchilada wraps or anything that would do to wrap chicken and guac and sour cream and salsa and cheese and whatever else we decided to put in it.
“Ah,” he said knowledgably, “Probably in the pasta section.”
“Okay, great, where’s that?”
“Do you want a pizza?”
“Pardon.”
“Is it pizza you want?”
“No, I want fajita wraps, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked for fajita wraps.”
“Is it pizza?”
Kai looked at me and raised his eyebrows again as a warning that we were dealing with some kind of sub-human here and perhaps we should make our escape while we were still safe, but I was determined to see it through to the bitter end. “No, it’s not pizza. Fajita wraps aren’t pizza. In fact, I’m not planning on having pizza anytime this week. Otherwise I’d have asked for pizza. I do have plans for dinner tonight though. And they involve cooking fajitas, so I thought I’d buy some wraps to prevent all the chicken and guac and sour cream and salsa falling out of my hands and all over my shirt when I try to eat them.”
“Follow me.”
So we did. We followed Wines & Spirits right the way across the store to the pizza section, where a couple of guys in white ‘Rude Boy’ hats were working. He had a hushed conversation with a lady behind the counter and she looked up and asked me if it was ready-made wraps that I was looking for.
“Yeah, I’d kind of figured that would be better than spending four hours tonight blending flour, baking powder, salt and water together in a baking bowl, kneading the dough and then chucking the whole lot into some kind of a Mexican saucepan. I was half expecting you guys to have prepared these for me so I can just buy the already made tortilla wrap.”
“You don’t want pizza?” from Wines & Spirits.
“Are you taking the pizza, Wines & Spirits?”
“You want ready-made wraps?” from the lady behind the pizza counter.
“Yes.”
So she directed us over to the sandwich section which was next to the pizza counter. Wines & Spirits led the way. And here we found those kinds of ready-made wrap sandwiches that all the supermarkets sell nowadays.
“Listen Wines & Spirits, I’m being very patient with you right now, but we’re planning on eating fajitas tonight. I said that, didn’t I? That’s why I want fajita wraps. Not pizza and not sandwiches. But to eat the fajitas we need to wrap them up in tortilla wraps. If you don’t know where they are, then will you please call a manager?”
“I only work in wines & spirits.”
“I get that, Wines & Spirits, and I’m absolutely sure that if I wanted a rare 1998 Barolo Anteprima you’d be the man for me, but right now I just want some tortilla wraps, and I can see this is taxing you.”
“I think they’re with the pasta,” and off he marched in his stylishly nifty green Morrison’s jacket. Kai and I paced ourselves behind him. It was quite a long journey – the pasta section being at the complete opposite end of the store from the Rude Boys at the pizza counter – but eventually we arrived at the pasta section where we found tortilla wraps for fajitas, enchiladas, burritos and everything else Mexican.
“Listen, Wines & Spirits, ten minutes ago you said we’d find fajita wraps in the pasta section.”
“Yes,” he said proudly, pleased that he was able to help a customer.
“But …. Forget it. Wines & Spirits, it’s been emotional. Thank you.”
And it was at that point that a light bulb came on and I thought to myself, “If I was a writer like that Charlie bloke who’s got books on Amazon I could write about this experience and publish it for posterity. I could make Wines and Spirits famous. His brilliance could be acclaimed down through the centuries.”
You’re not going to tell us your inspirations, are you?
It’s unlikely, isn’t it?
Okay, how do you think Indie writers are perceived nowadays?
Ah ha! I can answer that one! It’s a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we’re not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad’s garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a record company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who’s just landed a job cooking with Marco Pierre White?
There’s no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there’s a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen – and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating.
It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been flowing around your brain, pulsating and swimming, knocking into one another until you can finally ambush them and leak them out onto the page.
Where I grew up businesses were all industry-based, and in those days no one encouraged you to be a writer. There were tradesmen and engineers and you were expected to step into an apprenticeship. If I had gone up to someone and said, “Listen, I’d love to be a writer,” they would have said, “What! What’s wrong with you? You can’t do that kind of stuff.”
“But I’d like to write a book.”
“Jesus, you what! Forget it kid, you’ve got to get a proper job.”
And initially I was influenced by the social norms of the neighbourhood and the other kid’s parents, who were all bricklayers or carpenters or on their way to pursuing an apprenticeship in other trades. That mentality nagged at me until I slowly became more comfortable with pursuing the written word and, at the same time, rejecting the normal role-based society around me. I experimented with creating words more and more, and somewhere deep inside a little bird took wing, for I was becoming acutely aware that I didn’t want to do anything else. I looked around at my friends and their families and decided that I didn’t want to end up where they were headed. I wanted something more out of my life and was searching for the sense of accomplishment and pride that I couldn’t possibly find from working as a bricklayer. I also wanted to travel, but that’s another story. To misquote the poet Robert Frost, “I took the path less travelled, and that has made all the difference.”
You mentioned tradesmen. Would you care to expand? How do they fit in with your list of creative personalities?
Certainly. I don’t think construction workers are always honoured in the way they deserve. Barring natural disasters a house is going to remain standing until it’s demolished, and that’s irrespective of the quality of craftsmanship. But the aesthetic qualities of good bricks will never be appreciated unless the workmanship is of the highest standard. Whether its writing or bricklaying, quality of workmanship will always be the determining factor as to whether or not the finished product turns out mediocre or really exceptional. The choice of brick – just like the choice of words – may well have a large bearing on the aesthetics of a new build, be it a large housing estate or just an ordinary garden wall, but put the trowel in the right hands and poor quality bricks can be made to look much better than they really are.
A good bricklayer can lay his last brick of the day, point up, wash up, turn his back on his day’s work, and every single one of the joints between the bricks will be exactly 15mm. Why? Because he’s done it so many times, that’s why. It’s repetitive.
It’s probably the same for a hairdresser, a mechanic, a musician, a prostitute and I’m sure Masai Warriors hunting lions in the heart of the Masai Mara.
It’s a strange irony that most people who are truly creative don’t really know where their ideas come from. To be a writer, just like all of these crafts mentioned above, is an art form. You can take evening classes in writing at the local library, where you go along every Tuesday night and read out your weekly piece, and that can serve to improve your knowledge, but to be a real writer you have to first of all be an artist. The art of searching for words radiates from deep inside the writer, and I truly feel that when a true writer is sitting quietly at his desk his movements are beautifully interwoven. His breathing will even come with an effortless grace. The ability to move fluidly in his study in this manner begins with a truly intuitive knowledge, although if the truth were known, there’s a little bit of insanity in the writer that does everyone an awful lot of good.
As a form of body language, when the mind is receptive to the sensory experience of his desk, writing speaks the truth about all thoughts and feelings. Now I don’t want to be misunderstood here because this isn’t a special talent or skill. It’s present in all of us. The trick is to discover it, cultivate it and translate it from an internal state to an expressive sensuality. It is truly a creative impulse that unconsciously expresses emotions and can also arouse emotion in the person reading the book. The beauty and harmony of the writer never gets old and there are as many new things to learn each day, as there are varieties of adjectives, nouns and verbs in the world. It is the ultimate way to communicate with your reader. There are hundreds of thousands of bricklayers and musicians, and I’m not belittling them here because we need walls and we need music, but I truly believe that what some of them do comes from a higher source.
Wow! Okay, I can go along with that. Do you feel writers, and other creative people, don’t really get the credit they deserve?
Absolutely. Writers, musicians and artists used to be treated as romantics. The practice of an unconventional ‘Bohemian’ lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people was really exotic in the 19th century when marginalized and impoverished journalists, artists, writers, actors and musicians lived in the low-class, low-rent Gypsy neighbourhoods of Western Europe and were often regarded as wanderers, adventurers and even vagabonds, practicing free love and frugality. The original Flower Power children.
One of my heroines is Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, who always gave her birth date to coincide with the start of the Mexican Revolution. Her self-portraits were wild and her love affairs with both men and women included painter Diego Riviera, who she married twice, Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí, art dealers, writers, poets (Andre Breton AND his wife), Japanese sculptors, erotic dancers (The Creole Goddess Josephine Baker), Hungarian photographers and a number of actresses. My affairs include No-Knickers Nicky who I used to sell Timeshare with, Blonde Cathy from Bournemouth and a tubby little waitress with big boobs and a grating Northern accent, I can’t remember her name. Oh, and there was that girl who was married to a mate of mine. She owned a café, but it’s probably best if we say no more about that.
So its plain to see the romance has slightly slipped from the Bohemian lifestyle. But we’re literary Gypsies, all of us, and it’s only since the introduction of the Internet that we’re starting to realise that we’re not alone. The Internet is connecting all the healers and storytellers, the weird people and mystics, the writers and painters, the ones who are slightly cracked. I’ve always loved wild people.
“Here’s to the crazy ones,” said Jack Kerouac, “The misfits, the rebels, the trouble makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify them or vilify them. The only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Why? Because they change things, that’s why. They push the human race forwards, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, WE SEE GENIUS! Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Those are the writers, artists and musicians.
I wrote a poem about Frida Kahlo. I don’t write a lot of poems, it’s not my genre, but I wrote this one for her;
Kahlo is a ‘blue-house’ colour
Although not necessarily blue.
Kahlo is more Acapulco gold
Or burnt Roman ochre
Or even Spanish ochre
With touches of burgundy, nutmeg and bougainvillea.
Kahlo is Mezcal with chilli
Dried citrus peels
Red pepper
Cedar
And cigar leaf
Woody notes
And heat sneaking up fast.
Kahlo is pink mountains of shrimp in the markets
And barrio fiestas
Where exotic Tehuana women with flowers in their hair
Dance with rhythm and dignity
While their long rabona skirts
Billow out around them
Lo que el agua me ha dado
Kahlo is the colour of wild people and free thinkers
Frida Kahlo is the colour of legends
Myths
And cult figures
“Diego on my mind” is Kahlo coloured.
I hope the end is joyful
And I hope never to come back.
Do you have any favourite writers or book?
Absolutely, I love American low life; Bukowski, Harry Crews, John Fante, Dan Fante. I love Steinbeck too. One of my favourite books is Cannery Row. In fact my two favourite books are Flesh and Blood by Pete Hamill and Sailor by Richard Jessop. They’re both out of print but I’ve read them several times.
Has your style of writing ever been compared to anyone else?
Hahahaha, you won’t believe this, but yes. Two people, both now dead, Charles Bukowski and Socrates. Their names keep popping up in reviews; “Mr Bukowski, meet Socrates. This is an exceptionally amusing collection of observations of daily life,” “The prose style reminded me quite a lot of Charles Bukowski’s short essays and observations,” “It reminded me a lot of Bukowski’s novels, but particularly Factotum and Post Office,” “Had me laughing out loud several times, which doesn’t happen often to me. It reminded me a lot of Bukowski’s novels,” (I swear those are two completely separate reviewers), “Karl Wiggins is like a contemporary Socrates.” When I read that, I was like blimey!
Any Indie writers who you’d like to mention?
Karl: Oh yeah, of course, of course. You’re not bad yourself actually, and there’s a few others out there who are really talented. Jackie (JM) Johnson is a completely unsung talent. She’s written a series of books called ‘The Starbirth Assignment’ which is a mixture of S.A.S. with futuristic powers chasing down drug barons. Really, really good.
Travis Casey is another talent. Light-hearted easy-to-read, not quite what you’d call erotica, but enough sex and amusing situations to keep you entertained.
Carole McKee is an exceptional writer. I’d describe her as YA for grown-ups. And I’d like to make something perfectly clear. If anyone saw me on the train to work reading `Choices’ and looking like I was welling up ….. I wasn’t. I’d just pulled a hair out of nose, that’s all, okay? Wasn’t crying! Now that we’ve cleared that up, I’d also like to state that I’m not a real big Romance reader. The Romance genre isn’t my first choice of book. But this bloody story captured me. And it just gets better and better! I don’t wish to be a spoiler but full marks to Carole McKee for not only addressing a number of sensitive issues but having the insight to look at them from both sides of the coin. McKee forces you to make judgments and then breaks down the barriers by impressing upon the reader to see things in a different light.”
Another great writer is Anita Melillo, who has an exquisite writing style. She epitomises what every struggling scribbler is attempting to create when they attend a `creative writing’ course and have been set exercises to complete before they go back to the scout hall or Fuchsia’s house next Tuesday to read their pieces to the group. Anita however, has cracked it! I am totally in awe of the manner in which she draws the reader in, brings to life the various settings in which we find the protagonist and crams so much into her novels without making it seem overcrowded. You’ve got romance, you’ve got the horror of hand-to-hand fighting during the civil war, you’ve got Indian camps and most importantly you’ve got family as the main theme running through her books.
Other authors who’ve impressed me recently are Hunter S. Jones, M.K. Jubb, K.R. Rowe, Zoe Saadia and Sue Whitmer, who’s written a beautiful about hoarders entitled ‘Collecting Dreams.’
If you like erotica Billierosie is the absolute best. Unlike some of these awful books where they both jump into bed with each other as soon as they meet, Billierosie writes with intelligence, building plots and sub-plots around the story.
And there’s a new poet on the scene that’s well worth checking out. Doc Wallace. I’m bound to have missed someone out, but these are people I get excited about when I hear they’ve brought out a new book
Finally, you write mostly in the comedy vein, and there’s sometimes a lot of anger in your writing, but in this interview you’ve shown a different side to yourself. What essentially annoys you about the self-publishing industry?
Do you know what annoys me, Charlie? Writers who insult the reader. I have absolute respect for the reader and I love to hear from them, but do you know what’s really starting to get on my tits? It’s these stupid Facebook pictures of people reading books and little quotes on them making out that reading is the only thing that life’s about. It’s not! There are far more important things than reading. Family and friends for instance, spending time with your kids.
Now we all know this. There’s nothing new here, but these stupid little quotes with pictures of people reading books are designed for one thing, and that’s to make out to the reader that they have to purchase more books in order for their life to be complete.
I’ve got a few here. Here’s a really bad one, “I’m not ignoring you, it’s just that I belong to this book right now.” WHAT! Please spare me!
Here’s another one, “She who reads is booked every night.” That’s a T-shirt. Do you get it? Do you see the clever, adept play on words? Booked, yeah? As in booked like she’s got loads of mates, and booked as in books. Brilliant, huh? Do you think the same people write this crap also pen those stupid little jokes that fall out of Christmas crackers?
“Life is an open book full of blank pages. You write the story as you go.” Oh, piss off!
“Reading books is the most glorious pastimes that humankind has yet devised.” Well, it’s not is it? Making love has to figure somewhere close to the top of the list. Or how about a good dinner party with old friends where the banter is just flowing? What about watching your kid play football and seeing him score a goal. The expression on his face. Is reading books more ‘glorious’ than any of those? Of course it’s not.
“The giddy feeling you get when you walk into a bookshop.” What giddy feeling. I don’t know about you but I get a giddy feeling when I step off the treadmill at the gym. And also on my way to a kebab shop after sinking about 13 pints. But walking into a bookshop. Nope, not me.
“To reach the top we stand on the books we’ve read.” I don’t know what to say about that. It’s just bloody stupid, isn’t it?
“Some girls dream of a big walk-in closet in their bedroom. I want a walk-in library in mine.” That’s because you’re Billy-no-mates who never gets invited out with the girls!
“Start a book. Ten hours later realise you haven’t eaten or gone to the bathroom.” What are you, stupid? Why haven’t you eaten? Are you trying to make out to the reader that books are that good that you so lose yourself in them that the rest of your life completely fizzles out. Maybe next week you’ll read for a whole week. Perhaps you’ll start reading a book at a bus stop and they’ll find your skeleton in fifty years time.
“Read! It’s music you hear with your eyes!” Don’t be so bloody stupid. Of course it’s not. Music you hear with your eyes, my arse!
“You can’t buy happiness but you can buy books, and that’s kind of the same thing.” Oh, piss off!
Here’s a good one, “You know you’re a book lover when books are top of the list of things you’d save in a fire.” Of course they’re not. Any of us, once we’ve got the people out of the building, will save the photographs WAY BEFORE books!
“A book commits suicide every time you watch a reality show.” Oh, grow up, please. A book commits suicide ….. was the person who wrote this on ketamine at the time?
“A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely with the change in yourself.” Eh? I mean, how lame is that?
“Being somewhere with friends or family and thinking ‘I could be reading right now,’” makes you a really sad bastard indeed.
“Let’s go library hopping. It’s like bar hopping for intelligent people.” Hey, yeah let’s! Count me in! Rather than go to the bar with a good crowd, have a few drinks, a few laughs, I’d sooner be sitting in the library with all those intelligent people!
“We lose ourselves in books. We find ourselves there too.” Fuck off! I wish you’d fucking stay lost!
“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world.” Dude, you need to get out more.
“People who know and love the same books as you have the road map to your soul.” What utter shit! Why don’t we download our latest New Age track of a couple of dogs pissing in a tin can before we read that quote again. I’m sure we’ll find a hidden deeper meaning.
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” Do you think it’s just one person who writes all this crap? Or is there like a community of scary people who talk shit like this to each other on a daily basis?
I don’t know the answer, but I have a sneaking suspicion that all of this crap is written with the reader in mind, for the sole purpose to get him/her to part with his hard-earned money and buy another book. It’s not supposed to be this way. Books are great. Reading’s great. And if you find a book you enjoy, then tell your mates and try another one by that author. That way perhaps he/she can afford to keep writing. But reading books is certainly not the most important thing on the planet.
Karl, thank you. A last word?
Yeah. After anyone has finished a book, please go back to Amazon and leave a review on it. Doesn’t have to be anything special, just a bit of a blurb, but reviews really are bread & water to a struggling scribbler. It really is appreciated.
Wow, and that’s what you call an interview. Personally, I’m captivated by this guy. He writes in the same genre as me, but he’s a lot braver. When he rants, he doesn’t let political correctness get in the way, and I love that. I buy everything he writes and devour it
Hahahaha, you know full well I don’t answer questions like that. I don’t do the standard Author Interview questions like Do you have a specific writing style? How did you come up with the title? What books have most influenced you? What book are you reading now? Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Hang on; I’ll answer that last one about a message in my writing. First of all I don’t write novels. Huge respect to all the writers out there for their outstanding, far-fetched, comical, sometimes brutal, often ludicrous and downright fab imaginations. I have never, ever written fiction in my life because I completely lack the artistry, yet there are so many writers who allow their imaginations to fly, build a plot, build a sub-plot and continue to write superb story lines in that fashion.
All I’ve ever written is from my observations of life. I’m a piss-taker, which doesn’t necessarily make for a great writer, but it’s what I do. I don’t take my subject matter too seriously, and have little patience for anyone who does. I’m well aware that not everybody ‘gets’ me, but those that don’t can read the next guy’s stuff. I have no problem with that.
We walk a fine line, us writers, living in fear and dread that we might upset someone. And we’re often judged as people by what we write, even though we may be simply playing with words. Critics judge the author as opposed to judging what he writes, which is about as silly as judging the persona of a chef after eating something he’s cooked. I once wrote a poem about a rape, yet that doesn’t mean I’m a rapist. It just means I wrote a poem about a rape.
I’m going off track here, haven’t I? I tend to do that a lot. I’m supposed to be writing about any message in my writing and instead I’ve found myself rambling on about what a ‘fine line us writers walk.’ Christ, where did that line come from?
Okay, is there a message in my writing? Well yeah, there is. My goal, my life’s ambition if you like, is to give direction to comedy, purpose to satire. And this is probably why I write the way I do, in order to use self-deprecating, piss-taking humour to bring to the fore situations that just don’t stack up. To demonstrate that serious issues can be approached with humour.
Embarrassingly, a number of the reviews for my books seem to involve people losing control of their bladder; “Anyone who is a bit saucy, very fond of boobies and doesn’t mind peeing slightly when they laugh too hard, this is the book for you!” “Best not to read this book on the train if you have a full bladder because by the end of your journey you will have a damp patch in an embarrassing place.” “I have to admit that I wet myself twice while reading it but this may in part have been due to my age and a couple of bottles of a fine St. Emilion,” “Due to the laughter you owe my secretary one clean pair of knickers.”
Two reviewers have even suggested I should tour as a stand-up comedian; “I found myself laughing out-loud and even sharing segments with my spouse ….. I think Karl could tour as a stand-up comedian,” “Mr Wiggins has views on life that are expressed in a manner worthy of any stand-up comedian.”
So my scribblings do seem to raise a smile and a chuckle, and either way you look at it, that has to be a good thing. Hardly any subject is taboo to the Englishman when he’s laughing, and this often seems insensitive to other cultures, but the bedrock of the British sense of humour is a strong sense of sarcasm and self-deprecation. The British can be very passionate – and if you doubt that try going to a football match – but that passion is often hidden deep in our humour so that other nationals fail to not only recognise the deadpan delivery and are never too sure if they’ve been involved in a serious conversation or just a little bit of friendly banter. Having said that my style of writing is now appealing more and more to the American market.
So what inspired you to write your latest novel?
You! You inspired me to write my latest novel. My son, Kai, and I were in the local Morrison’s. Kai was planning on cooking fajitas for dinner, Sue was out with the girls and we needed to buy some fajita wraps. Morrison’s is HUGE so it was always going to be a challenge. I asked a girl packing shelves but as Morrison’s employees tend to look after just one section they get a little confused when you ask about something outside of their comfort zone. She pointed towards another bloke in a snazzy Morrison’s green jacket and said, “Ask him, he works in wines & spirits.”
I looked at Kai who raised his eyebrows in a “Are you really sure you want to go this route” kind of look, but as it seemed like the next clue in our ‘task for the day’ we wandered over to the wines & spirits bloke and asked him where we could find fajita wraps, or burrito wraps or enchilada wraps or anything that would do to wrap chicken and guac and sour cream and salsa and cheese and whatever else we decided to put in it.
“Ah,” he said knowledgably, “Probably in the pasta section.”
“Okay, great, where’s that?”
“Do you want a pizza?”
“Pardon.”
“Is it pizza you want?”
“No, I want fajita wraps, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked for fajita wraps.”
“Is it pizza?”
Kai looked at me and raised his eyebrows again as a warning that we were dealing with some kind of sub-human here and perhaps we should make our escape while we were still safe, but I was determined to see it through to the bitter end. “No, it’s not pizza. Fajita wraps aren’t pizza. In fact, I’m not planning on having pizza anytime this week. Otherwise I’d have asked for pizza. I do have plans for dinner tonight though. And they involve cooking fajitas, so I thought I’d buy some wraps to prevent all the chicken and guac and sour cream and salsa falling out of my hands and all over my shirt when I try to eat them.”
“Follow me.”
So we did. We followed Wines & Spirits right the way across the store to the pizza section, where a couple of guys in white ‘Rude Boy’ hats were working. He had a hushed conversation with a lady behind the counter and she looked up and asked me if it was ready-made wraps that I was looking for.
“Yeah, I’d kind of figured that would be better than spending four hours tonight blending flour, baking powder, salt and water together in a baking bowl, kneading the dough and then chucking the whole lot into some kind of a Mexican saucepan. I was half expecting you guys to have prepared these for me so I can just buy the already made tortilla wrap.”
“You don’t want pizza?” from Wines & Spirits.
“Are you taking the pizza, Wines & Spirits?”
“You want ready-made wraps?” from the lady behind the pizza counter.
“Yes.”
So she directed us over to the sandwich section which was next to the pizza counter. Wines & Spirits led the way. And here we found those kinds of ready-made wrap sandwiches that all the supermarkets sell nowadays.
“Listen Wines & Spirits, I’m being very patient with you right now, but we’re planning on eating fajitas tonight. I said that, didn’t I? That’s why I want fajita wraps. Not pizza and not sandwiches. But to eat the fajitas we need to wrap them up in tortilla wraps. If you don’t know where they are, then will you please call a manager?”
“I only work in wines & spirits.”
“I get that, Wines & Spirits, and I’m absolutely sure that if I wanted a rare 1998 Barolo Anteprima you’d be the man for me, but right now I just want some tortilla wraps, and I can see this is taxing you.”
“I think they’re with the pasta,” and off he marched in his stylishly nifty green Morrison’s jacket. Kai and I paced ourselves behind him. It was quite a long journey – the pasta section being at the complete opposite end of the store from the Rude Boys at the pizza counter – but eventually we arrived at the pasta section where we found tortilla wraps for fajitas, enchiladas, burritos and everything else Mexican.
“Listen, Wines & Spirits, ten minutes ago you said we’d find fajita wraps in the pasta section.”
“Yes,” he said proudly, pleased that he was able to help a customer.
“But …. Forget it. Wines & Spirits, it’s been emotional. Thank you.”
And it was at that point that a light bulb came on and I thought to myself, “If I was a writer like that Charlie bloke who’s got books on Amazon I could write about this experience and publish it for posterity. I could make Wines and Spirits famous. His brilliance could be acclaimed down through the centuries.”
You’re not going to tell us your inspirations, are you?
It’s unlikely, isn’t it?
Okay, how do you think Indie writers are perceived nowadays?
Ah ha! I can answer that one! It’s a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we’re not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad’s garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a record company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who’s just landed a job cooking with Marco Pierre White?
There’s no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there’s a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen – and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating.
It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been flowing around your brain, pulsating and swimming, knocking into one another until you can finally ambush them and leak them out onto the page.
Where I grew up businesses were all industry-based, and in those days no one encouraged you to be a writer. There were tradesmen and engineers and you were expected to step into an apprenticeship. If I had gone up to someone and said, “Listen, I’d love to be a writer,” they would have said, “What! What’s wrong with you? You can’t do that kind of stuff.”
“But I’d like to write a book.”
“Jesus, you what! Forget it kid, you’ve got to get a proper job.”
And initially I was influenced by the social norms of the neighbourhood and the other kid’s parents, who were all bricklayers or carpenters or on their way to pursuing an apprenticeship in other trades. That mentality nagged at me until I slowly became more comfortable with pursuing the written word and, at the same time, rejecting the normal role-based society around me. I experimented with creating words more and more, and somewhere deep inside a little bird took wing, for I was becoming acutely aware that I didn’t want to do anything else. I looked around at my friends and their families and decided that I didn’t want to end up where they were headed. I wanted something more out of my life and was searching for the sense of accomplishment and pride that I couldn’t possibly find from working as a bricklayer. I also wanted to travel, but that’s another story. To misquote the poet Robert Frost, “I took the path less travelled, and that has made all the difference.”
You mentioned tradesmen. Would you care to expand? How do they fit in with your list of creative personalities?
Certainly. I don’t think construction workers are always honoured in the way they deserve. Barring natural disasters a house is going to remain standing until it’s demolished, and that’s irrespective of the quality of craftsmanship. But the aesthetic qualities of good bricks will never be appreciated unless the workmanship is of the highest standard. Whether its writing or bricklaying, quality of workmanship will always be the determining factor as to whether or not the finished product turns out mediocre or really exceptional. The choice of brick – just like the choice of words – may well have a large bearing on the aesthetics of a new build, be it a large housing estate or just an ordinary garden wall, but put the trowel in the right hands and poor quality bricks can be made to look much better than they really are.
A good bricklayer can lay his last brick of the day, point up, wash up, turn his back on his day’s work, and every single one of the joints between the bricks will be exactly 15mm. Why? Because he’s done it so many times, that’s why. It’s repetitive.
It’s probably the same for a hairdresser, a mechanic, a musician, a prostitute and I’m sure Masai Warriors hunting lions in the heart of the Masai Mara.
It’s a strange irony that most people who are truly creative don’t really know where their ideas come from. To be a writer, just like all of these crafts mentioned above, is an art form. You can take evening classes in writing at the local library, where you go along every Tuesday night and read out your weekly piece, and that can serve to improve your knowledge, but to be a real writer you have to first of all be an artist. The art of searching for words radiates from deep inside the writer, and I truly feel that when a true writer is sitting quietly at his desk his movements are beautifully interwoven. His breathing will even come with an effortless grace. The ability to move fluidly in his study in this manner begins with a truly intuitive knowledge, although if the truth were known, there’s a little bit of insanity in the writer that does everyone an awful lot of good.
As a form of body language, when the mind is receptive to the sensory experience of his desk, writing speaks the truth about all thoughts and feelings. Now I don’t want to be misunderstood here because this isn’t a special talent or skill. It’s present in all of us. The trick is to discover it, cultivate it and translate it from an internal state to an expressive sensuality. It is truly a creative impulse that unconsciously expresses emotions and can also arouse emotion in the person reading the book. The beauty and harmony of the writer never gets old and there are as many new things to learn each day, as there are varieties of adjectives, nouns and verbs in the world. It is the ultimate way to communicate with your reader. There are hundreds of thousands of bricklayers and musicians, and I’m not belittling them here because we need walls and we need music, but I truly believe that what some of them do comes from a higher source.
Wow! Okay, I can go along with that. Do you feel writers, and other creative people, don’t really get the credit they deserve?
Absolutely. Writers, musicians and artists used to be treated as romantics. The practice of an unconventional ‘Bohemian’ lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people was really exotic in the 19th century when marginalized and impoverished journalists, artists, writers, actors and musicians lived in the low-class, low-rent Gypsy neighbourhoods of Western Europe and were often regarded as wanderers, adventurers and even vagabonds, practicing free love and frugality. The original Flower Power children.
One of my heroines is Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, who always gave her birth date to coincide with the start of the Mexican Revolution. Her self-portraits were wild and her love affairs with both men and women included painter Diego Riviera, who she married twice, Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí, art dealers, writers, poets (Andre Breton AND his wife), Japanese sculptors, erotic dancers (The Creole Goddess Josephine Baker), Hungarian photographers and a number of actresses. My affairs include No-Knickers Nicky who I used to sell Timeshare with, Blonde Cathy from Bournemouth and a tubby little waitress with big boobs and a grating Northern accent, I can’t remember her name. Oh, and there was that girl who was married to a mate of mine. She owned a café, but it’s probably best if we say no more about that.
So its plain to see the romance has slightly slipped from the Bohemian lifestyle. But we’re literary Gypsies, all of us, and it’s only since the introduction of the Internet that we’re starting to realise that we’re not alone. The Internet is connecting all the healers and storytellers, the weird people and mystics, the writers and painters, the ones who are slightly cracked. I’ve always loved wild people.
“Here’s to the crazy ones,” said Jack Kerouac, “The misfits, the rebels, the trouble makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify them or vilify them. The only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Why? Because they change things, that’s why. They push the human race forwards, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, WE SEE GENIUS! Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Those are the writers, artists and musicians.
I wrote a poem about Frida Kahlo. I don’t write a lot of poems, it’s not my genre, but I wrote this one for her;
Kahlo is a ‘blue-house’ colour
Although not necessarily blue.
Kahlo is more Acapulco gold
Or burnt Roman ochre
Or even Spanish ochre
With touches of burgundy, nutmeg and bougainvillea.
Kahlo is Mezcal with chilli
Dried citrus peels
Red pepper
Cedar
And cigar leaf
Woody notes
And heat sneaking up fast.
Kahlo is pink mountains of shrimp in the markets
And barrio fiestas
Where exotic Tehuana women with flowers in their hair
Dance with rhythm and dignity
While their long rabona skirts
Billow out around them
Lo que el agua me ha dado
Kahlo is the colour of wild people and free thinkers
Frida Kahlo is the colour of legends
Myths
And cult figures
“Diego on my mind” is Kahlo coloured.
I hope the end is joyful
And I hope never to come back.
Do you have any favourite writers or book?
Absolutely, I love American low life; Bukowski, Harry Crews, John Fante, Dan Fante. I love Steinbeck too. One of my favourite books is Cannery Row. In fact my two favourite books are Flesh and Blood by Pete Hamill and Sailor by Richard Jessop. They’re both out of print but I’ve read them several times.
Has your style of writing ever been compared to anyone else?
Hahahaha, you won’t believe this, but yes. Two people, both now dead, Charles Bukowski and Socrates. Their names keep popping up in reviews; “Mr Bukowski, meet Socrates. This is an exceptionally amusing collection of observations of daily life,” “The prose style reminded me quite a lot of Charles Bukowski’s short essays and observations,” “It reminded me a lot of Bukowski’s novels, but particularly Factotum and Post Office,” “Had me laughing out loud several times, which doesn’t happen often to me. It reminded me a lot of Bukowski’s novels,” (I swear those are two completely separate reviewers), “Karl Wiggins is like a contemporary Socrates.” When I read that, I was like blimey!
Any Indie writers who you’d like to mention?
Karl: Oh yeah, of course, of course. You’re not bad yourself actually, and there’s a few others out there who are really talented. Jackie (JM) Johnson is a completely unsung talent. She’s written a series of books called ‘The Starbirth Assignment’ which is a mixture of S.A.S. with futuristic powers chasing down drug barons. Really, really good.
Travis Casey is another talent. Light-hearted easy-to-read, not quite what you’d call erotica, but enough sex and amusing situations to keep you entertained.
Carole McKee is an exceptional writer. I’d describe her as YA for grown-ups. And I’d like to make something perfectly clear. If anyone saw me on the train to work reading `Choices’ and looking like I was welling up ….. I wasn’t. I’d just pulled a hair out of nose, that’s all, okay? Wasn’t crying! Now that we’ve cleared that up, I’d also like to state that I’m not a real big Romance reader. The Romance genre isn’t my first choice of book. But this bloody story captured me. And it just gets better and better! I don’t wish to be a spoiler but full marks to Carole McKee for not only addressing a number of sensitive issues but having the insight to look at them from both sides of the coin. McKee forces you to make judgments and then breaks down the barriers by impressing upon the reader to see things in a different light.”
Another great writer is Anita Melillo, who has an exquisite writing style. She epitomises what every struggling scribbler is attempting to create when they attend a `creative writing’ course and have been set exercises to complete before they go back to the scout hall or Fuchsia’s house next Tuesday to read their pieces to the group. Anita however, has cracked it! I am totally in awe of the manner in which she draws the reader in, brings to life the various settings in which we find the protagonist and crams so much into her novels without making it seem overcrowded. You’ve got romance, you’ve got the horror of hand-to-hand fighting during the civil war, you’ve got Indian camps and most importantly you’ve got family as the main theme running through her books.
Other authors who’ve impressed me recently are Hunter S. Jones, M.K. Jubb, K.R. Rowe, Zoe Saadia and Sue Whitmer, who’s written a beautiful about hoarders entitled ‘Collecting Dreams.’
If you like erotica Billierosie is the absolute best. Unlike some of these awful books where they both jump into bed with each other as soon as they meet, Billierosie writes with intelligence, building plots and sub-plots around the story.
And there’s a new poet on the scene that’s well worth checking out. Doc Wallace. I’m bound to have missed someone out, but these are people I get excited about when I hear they’ve brought out a new book
Finally, you write mostly in the comedy vein, and there’s sometimes a lot of anger in your writing, but in this interview you’ve shown a different side to yourself. What essentially annoys you about the self-publishing industry?
Do you know what annoys me, Charlie? Writers who insult the reader. I have absolute respect for the reader and I love to hear from them, but do you know what’s really starting to get on my tits? It’s these stupid Facebook pictures of people reading books and little quotes on them making out that reading is the only thing that life’s about. It’s not! There are far more important things than reading. Family and friends for instance, spending time with your kids.
Now we all know this. There’s nothing new here, but these stupid little quotes with pictures of people reading books are designed for one thing, and that’s to make out to the reader that they have to purchase more books in order for their life to be complete.
I’ve got a few here. Here’s a really bad one, “I’m not ignoring you, it’s just that I belong to this book right now.” WHAT! Please spare me!
Here’s another one, “She who reads is booked every night.” That’s a T-shirt. Do you get it? Do you see the clever, adept play on words? Booked, yeah? As in booked like she’s got loads of mates, and booked as in books. Brilliant, huh? Do you think the same people write this crap also pen those stupid little jokes that fall out of Christmas crackers?
“Life is an open book full of blank pages. You write the story as you go.” Oh, piss off!
“Reading books is the most glorious pastimes that humankind has yet devised.” Well, it’s not is it? Making love has to figure somewhere close to the top of the list. Or how about a good dinner party with old friends where the banter is just flowing? What about watching your kid play football and seeing him score a goal. The expression on his face. Is reading books more ‘glorious’ than any of those? Of course it’s not.
“The giddy feeling you get when you walk into a bookshop.” What giddy feeling. I don’t know about you but I get a giddy feeling when I step off the treadmill at the gym. And also on my way to a kebab shop after sinking about 13 pints. But walking into a bookshop. Nope, not me.
“To reach the top we stand on the books we’ve read.” I don’t know what to say about that. It’s just bloody stupid, isn’t it?
“Some girls dream of a big walk-in closet in their bedroom. I want a walk-in library in mine.” That’s because you’re Billy-no-mates who never gets invited out with the girls!
“Start a book. Ten hours later realise you haven’t eaten or gone to the bathroom.” What are you, stupid? Why haven’t you eaten? Are you trying to make out to the reader that books are that good that you so lose yourself in them that the rest of your life completely fizzles out. Maybe next week you’ll read for a whole week. Perhaps you’ll start reading a book at a bus stop and they’ll find your skeleton in fifty years time.
“Read! It’s music you hear with your eyes!” Don’t be so bloody stupid. Of course it’s not. Music you hear with your eyes, my arse!
“You can’t buy happiness but you can buy books, and that’s kind of the same thing.” Oh, piss off!
Here’s a good one, “You know you’re a book lover when books are top of the list of things you’d save in a fire.” Of course they’re not. Any of us, once we’ve got the people out of the building, will save the photographs WAY BEFORE books!
“A book commits suicide every time you watch a reality show.” Oh, grow up, please. A book commits suicide ….. was the person who wrote this on ketamine at the time?
“A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely with the change in yourself.” Eh? I mean, how lame is that?
“Being somewhere with friends or family and thinking ‘I could be reading right now,’” makes you a really sad bastard indeed.
“Let’s go library hopping. It’s like bar hopping for intelligent people.” Hey, yeah let’s! Count me in! Rather than go to the bar with a good crowd, have a few drinks, a few laughs, I’d sooner be sitting in the library with all those intelligent people!
“We lose ourselves in books. We find ourselves there too.” Fuck off! I wish you’d fucking stay lost!
“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world.” Dude, you need to get out more.
“People who know and love the same books as you have the road map to your soul.” What utter shit! Why don’t we download our latest New Age track of a couple of dogs pissing in a tin can before we read that quote again. I’m sure we’ll find a hidden deeper meaning.
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” Do you think it’s just one person who writes all this crap? Or is there like a community of scary people who talk shit like this to each other on a daily basis?
I don’t know the answer, but I have a sneaking suspicion that all of this crap is written with the reader in mind, for the sole purpose to get him/her to part with his hard-earned money and buy another book. It’s not supposed to be this way. Books are great. Reading’s great. And if you find a book you enjoy, then tell your mates and try another one by that author. That way perhaps he/she can afford to keep writing. But reading books is certainly not the most important thing on the planet.
Karl, thank you. A last word?
Yeah. After anyone has finished a book, please go back to Amazon and leave a review on it. Doesn’t have to be anything special, just a bit of a blurb, but reviews really are bread & water to a struggling scribbler. It really is appreciated.
Wow, and that’s what you call an interview. Personally, I’m captivated by this guy. He writes in the same genre as me, but he’s a lot braver. When he rants, he doesn’t let political correctness get in the way, and I love that. I buy everything he writes and devour it
April 24, 2014
Professional Editing?
I was once approached by an English chef in New York to assist in co-authoring his auto-biography. It proved in the end to be an unproductive relationship, but that’s another story. He approached me for a number of reasons;
a) He was struggling. He can’t write and I can’t cook. Well, I do a pretty decent paella, but apart from that …
b) He, as he kept telling his wife, needed “Karl’s quirky touch.”
c) He needed a co-author who understood not only the tribulations of growing up in depressed parts of the UK, but also the English sense of humour.
We wrote the book, he sent it for ‘professional editing’ and the ‘editor’ ripped all the Englishness out of it. You’d have thought this chef had been brought up in North Carolina!
The British sense of humour, the bedrock of which is a strong sense of sarcasm and self-deprecation, was missing. Hardly any subject is taboo to the Englishman, and this often seems insensitive to other cultures, but it is what it is.
What our ‘editor’ failed to understand is that the British can be very passionate, but that’s often hidden deep in our humour so that other nationals fail to not only recognise the deadpan delivery but are never too sure if they’ve been involved in a serious conversation or just a little bit of friendly banter.
This editor thought it a good idea if we put a more ‘positive’ spin on things. And needless to say I had to edit all her editing in order to reflect the true person and the life he’d led.
And if you don’t think the British can be passionate? Try going to a football match!
a) He was struggling. He can’t write and I can’t cook. Well, I do a pretty decent paella, but apart from that …
b) He, as he kept telling his wife, needed “Karl’s quirky touch.”
c) He needed a co-author who understood not only the tribulations of growing up in depressed parts of the UK, but also the English sense of humour.
We wrote the book, he sent it for ‘professional editing’ and the ‘editor’ ripped all the Englishness out of it. You’d have thought this chef had been brought up in North Carolina!
The British sense of humour, the bedrock of which is a strong sense of sarcasm and self-deprecation, was missing. Hardly any subject is taboo to the Englishman, and this often seems insensitive to other cultures, but it is what it is.
What our ‘editor’ failed to understand is that the British can be very passionate, but that’s often hidden deep in our humour so that other nationals fail to not only recognise the deadpan delivery but are never too sure if they’ve been involved in a serious conversation or just a little bit of friendly banter.
This editor thought it a good idea if we put a more ‘positive’ spin on things. And needless to say I had to edit all her editing in order to reflect the true person and the life he’d led.
And if you don’t think the British can be passionate? Try going to a football match!
