Lindsley’s blog

Those who read my website (www.davidlindsley.info) know that I have had three novels published (you can read summaries and extracts on the website). People often tell me that “they have a book inside them”, and ask for advice because there are so many options open to them these days. So here goes!

At one time in the distant past, there were just two options open to would-be writers: self-publishing (otherwise known as vanity publishing), or working through a proper mainstream publisher. The former seemed to offer a simple way of overcoming the enormous difficulties of getting accepted by a mainstream publisher. In many cases, the latter route entailed getting your work accepted by an agent first, because many publishers simply won’t accept submissions from new writers, and always insist on working through an agent. By doing this they are effectively using the agents to filter out the gold from the dross - or the good from the rubbish.

And there is a lot of rubbish out there! Vanity publisher often praised anything submitted to them, telling would-be authors how wonderful their work was, and often offering to help improve the work to make it more marketable. And most vanity publishers were very adept at separating writers from their money!

Then, along came “print on demand” or PoD. Made possible by the availability of modern computers and typesetting machines, PoD offered an apparently easy way into becoming a published author: you wrote your book, uploaded it to the publisher as a Word document (or something similar), and they would produce nicely printed books with pretty glossy covers, available to anybody who wanted to buy them. Up to that point, no money changed hands: the publishers made their money by selling copies.

PoD publishers offered all sorts of services: you could use one of their ready-made cover designs for nothing, but having a design made to your specific requirements cost money. Also, if you wanted your books to appear in bookshops or via on-line retailers you had to buy distribution services, which included the acquisition of the all-important ISBN, the number used by stores and retailers to order your book for their customers. You could also buy marketing services.

As with most things in life, marketing is vital. If you don’t have it done for you by a professional you have to do it all yourself. Among other things, this means buying copies of your book to give away to newspapers and magazines. Make no mistake, doing this will almost certainly lead to your book ending up in the “slush pile” - the literary editor of a national daily newspaper told me that she gets about 40 books a day to review! Unless you can offer something really compelling or special you have little or no chance of having your book reviewed.

And as for getting great mountains of books onto the display tables of a bookseller requires enormous resources - loads of dosh!

So if you self-publish your book via the PoD route you have to spend hours of time, loads of money and much sheer, hard, slogging effort to market it.

Anyway, now to my own experiences. My first novel was “Far Point” and it was about the adventures of an engineer in China. I was lucky enough to fine an excellent agent on my first try. She worked hard to make it marketable and the end result was very different indeed from the first draft that I had sent her. In spite of this, the first couple of publishers she sent it to rejected it.

She told me not to worry: this was entirely usual. Unfortunately I was impatient. I’d read about PoD and decided to follow that route. The agent was unwilling to support me in this. (She was obviously very clued-up in the books business and knew the snags). So I had to go it alone, and I sent it to Lulu.com, who did a super job. I persuaded an artist friend to do a painting for the front cover and I designed and laid out the book myself.

I got a few reviews - mostly good, but many picking out the torrid sex scenes for special mention! - but still there are copies of “Far Point” mouldering in newspaper and TV slush piles all over the place! But then I got lucky, I heard that a group of major engineering institutions in the UK was organising a competition to find writers who could portray engineers in a good light - the profession had a poor image in the public’s eye and recruitment for engineers was bad. My book was short-listed and in the end won a special prize.

So now, with the title of “Prize-winning Author” under my belt, I set off to write a sequel. This was picked up by the first publisher I sent it to and “The Darkfall Switch” began to appear in bookstores and libraries. What’s more, the publisher offered me a three-book agreement, meaning that I had to submit my next two novels to them for “first refusal”.

Further emboldened, I wrote my third book - “Blind to Danger”. And then came disappointment: my publisher wouldn’t accept the book - it was “too long and the setting was far beyond the comfort-zone of their readers”.

But I was confident that the book had merit, so I sent it to a PoD publisher. This time I was seduced by a new PoD publisher called “Create Space” who were working in close collaboration with Amazon. This way I could enter for a competition called the “Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award” (ABNA) with the prize of a publishing deal from Pan Books.

Create Space were OK, but I must say that I had found it easier to work through Lulu. (Anyway, I didn’t get past the first selection process of the ABNA contest.) For a start, Create Space suffers from a common failure to understand the the USA is only one country in a big, big world: they offered no publishing services outside the US. So, to get my book onto the Amazon list I had to buy copies from Create Space, have them shipped to the UK and then sell them via Amazon. Buying small quantities of the book meant that, as a percentage of the book cover-price, the shipping charges were enormous. Very few people would buy a paperback at much over £5-6, yet I had to set a selling price of over £12 if I wasn’t going to loose money on every sale.

To be fair, I think that Create Space have learned something since then, and are tackling the problem but, as it was, I wished I’d stayed with Lulu.

That’s quite enough for now. I’ll talk about the delights of ebooks on another occasion!

I have spoken before about the damage that is done when accountants control too many of the operations of a company. I parodied Churchill and said, “accountants should be on tap, not in charge”. I have also said that, when addressing a business setback, the difference between an engineer’s approach and an accountant’s is that the former searches for ways of increasing income while the latter’s imagination is limited to looking at ways of cutting costs.

There has been much discussion of late on the costs and benefits of HS2 (the proposed high-speed rail link). It is fortunate that the Victorians and their successors took a long view towards the railways. A letter by Brian Sanders in “The Times” on March 31 said ‘The history of Britain’s railways shows that, taking them collectively, no overall profit was made year by year in the 19th and 20th centuries , even latterly despite Beeching etc.’ Then he asks: ‘But how would  the economy of the nation have flourished without a railway system?’

An excellent point, and one that applies equally across a very broad spectrum of businesses. I liken entrepreneurial businesses to the sales department of Great Britain Ltd: they may well cost money, but the prosperity of the whole enterprise depends on them.

On this basis, we should take a different view of profitability - the broad view. If this had been done over the past few decades we’d still be building cars in the UK, using steel manufactured here; we’d still be building entire aircraft (not just bits of them), using aluminium made here; we’d still have a shipbuilding industry, using materials sourced here. And all of these industries would be providing work for thousands, if not millions, of people, with fewer drains on the benefit system. And that would be real work, not just dead-end jobs, endlessly recycling consumables and imported goods.

And we’d be a proud nation still.

Northern Ireland’s imposition of a tax on large retail businesses, ostensibly to provide funding for small businesses, is a brave attempt to re-balance their economy. As regular readers of my blog will know, I have long been critical of the UK government’s predilection for retail. I have written about the myopic banks funding of retail in favour of manufacturing and the disasterous effect this has on our balance of payments.

Retail is economic masturbation: it relieves pressure easily, without doing anything really valuable for society at large. Too much retail feeds a cycle of consumer demand, which rolls on, creating jobs without building businesses that can compete with overseas suppliers. Because banks don’t understand manufacturing, they hold back support for this essential sector.

If you want to see how this has affected us all, just make a rough tally of how many British products you see on display when you next visit a retail store. You’ll see masses of fancy consumer goods, all imported, and very few British made. “Ah yes,” I hear government say. “That’s because labour costs are so much lower in the Far East”.

Balderdash! Yes, labour costs are lower there, but the process of manufacturing your iPad or flat-screen TV is largely automated. What has happened in the Far East is that they have wisely invested in the hugely expensive facilities needed for manufacturing. Look at Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturer on which Apple depends so heavily. They have recently cut working hours and raised wages without seriously damaging their profits. Why? Because those labour costs are a small part of the final cost of the manufactured product.

I can hear ministers say, “OK, but the costs of building those fabrication plants are so huge that we can’t afford it”.  Nonsense! If the returns are high, developed economies can afford the investment. Look at the massive outlay on the 3G mobile network a few years ago: worth it because the returns were seen to be massive. I’m not talking about anything like that level of investment; what I’m saying is that such foresight will provide large numbers of jobs and reduce the balance of payments deficit.

I suppose it’s a case of “bad news is good news”, but it does seem to me that newspapers, not to mention radio and TV programmes, positively revel in picking holes and showing the worst aspects of anything they feature. Any gaffe is pounced on with whoops of joy, and molehills are quickly turned into mountains.

It’s horribly off-putting to anybody with any sense, who will see through it and ignore it.

Let’s have news of the things that really matter!

On a lovely, bright sunny morning recently I was presented with yet more evidence that I am slowly losing my sight.

Having been attending eye hospitals for several years, my vision has begun to deteriorate over the past few months. I have three problems with my eyes: glaucoma, asteroid hyalosis and cataracts. The glaucoma is apparently due to pressure in the eyeball damaging the optic nerve. I have been applying eye drops which have kept the pressures under control but it is too late to save the 30% or more that I have lost. The  asteroid hyalosis takes the form of fine particles swimming about in the liquid of the eyeball (the vitreous humor). Lots of people suffer from “floaters”, where a few large particles swim across the field of view. There are mildly annoying: the problem with  asteroid hyalosis is that it looks like a fog or dust cloud, which becomes a serious problem when looking into bright light - hence that morning’s reminder. The cataracts are operable but when I had one removed last year it seemed to make matters worse. I think the procedure stirred up the particles and made the hyalosis more severe. Either way, the result is that I now have great difficulty in seeing objects or people in bright daylight, or in the dark when I am looking towards bright lights.

I’ll keep you advised of developments from time to time. Meanwhile, I hope these notes will help others in the same situation, and that all who read them will be sympathetic towards the people they see struggling in the street.

But don’t feel sorry for me. I have a very good life indeed and manage to enjoy every day.

There’s a lot of talk these days about a revival of our manufacturing sector. With twenty years of experience in manufacturing, another twenty in consulancy, I have strong feelings about this.

My initial reaction is “too little, too late”, but I have to be realistic. Industry will struggle on, and at this stage I can perhaps offer some insight that may just help people to make decisions.

In my experience, industry flourished when it was strongly supported by a large and successful parent company, because neither the government nor the banks understood the intricacies of engineering. You can see how banks think when you walk down the high street and see the dozens of little coffee shops that have sprung up, cheek by jowl with each other. You can understand the bank manager saying “I understand this and I can see the revenue stream”.

Well, it’s not a stream: it’s a trickle. What’s more, it’s a trickle that circulates round and round, meeting local needs but not contributing to the larger economy. It is a business that employs people, and it stimulates imports - all of those coffee beans or tea-leaves have to be imported - but it doesn’t contribute positively to the national economy.

Yet an item on the radio this morning showed how the huge hi-tech businesses in the US grew because, at their inception, they were strongly supported by local and national government there. I suspect the donors were more clued-up then ours are, and they were wiling to listen to the engineers and give them what they needed. We just don’t see that attitude from our banks these days. The burden falls venture-capital organizations - but these are necessarily keen to see a quick return on their investments - their own prosperity depends on it - and the long-term view is rarely taken.

It’s the banks, councils - and in the end the government - that has the resources to take that long-term view.

The current anti-US riots in Afghanistan highlight the care that nations need to exercise in this Internet-enabled world. It is easy for so-called sophisticated states to ignore how their actions are seen as being offensive to others. The fact is that there are many people and countries who are disgusted with images and videos that are freely available on the internet. We in the West may well smile and shrug our shoulders, but that is not the way in some places. We may well laugh at cartoons that lampoon religious figures, but others are horrified. In a world without boundaries, things that happen in one country are easily visible to anybody - anywhere in the world.

Every government needs to recognise this, as does everybody who puts anything on the Internet.

Still seething over the EU stupidity I recorded in January, I looked up the price of those tendon hammers in the USA. Guess what? Those dinky little bits of plastic and rubber that cost our hospitals over £5 each cost the Americans between $1 and $2. That’s £1.26, tops at today’s exchange rate. And some would have even closer ties with this overinflated behemoth? Grrrr!

With all the razzmatazz over the BAFTAs the showbiz world once again tries to convince us that only their profession enjoys such moments of achievement and public acclaim. They’re possibly right about the acclaim, because the interface between them and us - the media - is absolutely fixated with “celebs”. It’s a great pity, because many other professions have equally stunning  hearts-in-mouth moments. Just think about the completion of a major bridge-building project, or the switching-on of a complex plant. It such cases teams have laboured together for months or years and that final moment is when the fruits of their work are opened up for the benefit of humanity. Such moments are much more meaningful, important and long-lasting than those bows to the audience at the footlights.

The engineering profession needs to bring this fact to life, so that schoolchildren appreciate that it will be worthwhile, interesting, stimulating and rewarding to study maths and science.

In all the debate over the bonus offered to Stephen Hester, and then refused by him, the main issue to my mind is this: what is a given job worth?

Is the Chairman of a major banking group worth more than the surgeon who operates on somebody and saves their life, or more than a soldier who risks his life for the country? And what about the financial traders? They say that their salaries and bonuses are a small fraction of the value of the commodities they trade every minute of the day. But then what about the engineer at the National Grid’s control centre whose actions regulate the flow of electricity to towns, factories, hospitals and so on? The second-by-second flow of electricity is like the flow of electronic gold. If it’s OK for a financial trader to skim off a tiny bit of the money that passes through his or her keyboard, isn’t it equally justifiable for the Grid Control engineer to demand free electricity?