Ready for launch!

Exciting news - I have now completed my final edit of the book, and have put it together into an actual ebook! It's a strange feeling to actually be able to leaf through it on my iPad now.

There are a few more logistical things I need to sort out before it can go on sale, and I'm going to be ridiculously busy for the next few weeks as it is, and so I've decided on 1 December as the launch date.  As of then you'll be able to purchase The Two Empires  on the Kindle Store, and hopefully the iBookstore if I can get that figured out in time. I'm also looking at other digital stores, so watch this space. 

In the meantime, I'm very pleased to announce that the first ten chapters are now available to download.  I've made it available in different formats to suit different types of e-reader, but if you have any problems please let me know and hopefully I'll be able to sort you out.

The ebooks were created using Calibre, which is a piece of free software I can't recommend highly enough. Aside from creating ebooks, it's the very best way for managing an ebook library. If you've got any interest in reading ebooks then you should definitely be using it. 

Self-Publishing

I'd like to say a few words about self-publishing, based on my own experience so far, since it's something that is simultaneously remarkably easy and surprisingly complicated.

It's obviously a whole lot easier than it would have been just a few years ago, now that ebooks are something that a large proportion of the potential audience for your work is reading on a regular basis. The Kindle store and its equivalents allow you to turn your manuscript into something that is available instantly to readers around the world.  There are no upfront costs for printing books, and all the logistics are handled by the online store. Certainly as far as the Kindle store is concerned, publishing is in principle as easy as uploading your manuscript and cover art, typing in the basic details and choosing a price, and I'd be surprised if any of the other major stores are any different.

I say 'in principle' because of the one element of the process so far that has been surprisingly complicated: the tax requirements. The issue is that Amazon is apparently required by the US to withhold a percentage of all royalty payments on the basis that they might be subject to US income tax. I'm a UK citizen and resident, and so I pay income tax in the UK. Fortunately there's a double taxation treaty that means I don't have to pay it in the US as well, but unfortunately it isn't quite so simple as checking a box on the Kindle store.

Amazon does a good job of helping with at least part of the process, but the first step is to obtain a US Taxpayer Identification Number, and for that you're on your own.  I know that there's a lot of conflicting information out on the Internet, both from various blogs and from the IRS themselves, but this is my experience anyway.

You can apply for either an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number or an Employer's Identification Number, but I chose the ITIN since I'm an individual and don't employ anyone. You need to complete Form W7 (available here). The official instructions for the Form are not amazingly helpful, but there are a variety of guides available on the web.  You also need to send off confirmation from your publisher that you will be receiving royalties, but helpfully Amazon produces a standard letter for your to fill out and print.

The most confusing part is the identification requirement. Now, you can send off your original passport if you want, but since it takes about eight weeks for  them to reply (you have to post the form to Texas) I'd imagine most people don't want to do that. Instead you can send a copy of your passport, but not just any copy: it needs to be properly certified. I've heard it said elsewhere that you need to bring it into your local US embassy to be copied and signed, but when I looked there weren't any appointments at the embassy available.

Fortunately that's not actually necessary. The rules say that you can have the copy approved by the agency that issued your passport. Well, the UK Passport Office won't do that, but it turns out that there is a UK Legalisation Office whose function turns out to be much less interesting that the name would suggest. What you need to do is get a solicitor to copy the passport and certify it in accordance with the Legalisation Office's rules (which is much easier if you happen to work with a bunch of them like I do). Then, you pay the £30 fee on the Legalisation Office's website, fill out their form and send the form, receipt and copy passport off to them.  After a while it returns to you with a little bit of paper glued to the back, which is apparently what is required for it to be recognised abroad.

Once you've got that you can send everything off to the IRS, and at that point it just becomes a matter of waiting.  I've read about other people who have had their application rejected several times for errors on the form, but when I finally heard back from the IRS it was to confirm that my ITIN had been issued.

After that, all you need to do is answer a series of questions on the Kindle Direct Publishing site, which automatically fills out your form W8 and (mercifully) sends it off to the IRS electronically. Then, more waiting.

Still, it's really not that difficult, and the end result is well worth the hassle. If you're confused about anything just ask me - I might not know the answer but I can certainly make something up.

The Story So Far

As anyone who knows me could tell you, it's been a long journey to get here ('here' being, as of right now, eight more chapters to edit before final publication). I'm struggling to recall when I first started writing The Two Empires, but it must have been some time before 2006. I know this because the first chapter (as it then was, which is virtually unrecognisable compared to the current version) was submitted as part of my GCSE English coursework in a 'here's one I made earlier' moment.

The Two Empires wasn't my first idea for a book. The first story I seriously tried to turn into a full-length novel was a kind of modern-day Swallows and Amazons with less sailing experience but more child gang warfare. It never got beyond the first couple of chapters, but I had some cool ideas. Who knows, maybe I'll come back to it someday.

My second attempt was effectively Harry Potter in space. Given my vast love of J K Rowling's books and of all things Star Wars, this seemed perfectly natural at the time. The first few chapters related what I thought was a quite plausible first contact scenario, with aliens landing around the world and taking our young hero along to develop his latent magical talents.

With hindsight, the most interesting thing about it was the way I clumsily tried to shoehorn fantasy elements into a sci-fi setting. The Two Empires (and its sequels) rather turn this on its head, by approaching what is at first glance a fantasy world through a logical and analytical style more typical of traditional science fiction. I rather like it.

It was I think a while between giving up on my second book and starting The Two Empires. I wanted to get it right this time, and I spent a long time planning. There's a cute/stupid story about where the first seed of an idea came from, but I'll save that for another day. By the time I started on the first chapter I had the basic skeleton of the first book pretty well mapped out, and a rough idea of where the series was going.

The first draft of the book was entirely typed out on my dear old HP Ipaq PDA. I certainly got my money's worth from that thing; there can't have been many that typed 150,000 words in their lifetime. It certainly wasn't as fast as typing on a desktop, but I did quickly pick up enough speed with the stylus that it wasn't far off. The point was that I could take it with me and write whenever I wanted (for those reading this in the future, this was a time before ultrabooks, iPads or even smartphones). The Two Empires was written on car journeys, holidays, and sometimes just at home. It wasn't a regular process - I could go weeks without writing a word when I got stuck, only to blast through a chapter or more in a few days once inspiration finally hit.

While I knew what I wanted to happen at certain points in the story, the flesh of each chapter was largely made up as I went along. The exception to this are the last couple of chapters, which I had quite a detailed idea of in my head long before writing them.

My old PDA

The first draft was finished in late 2008. I celebrated with chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, which I had read somewhere was traditional on finishing a book. Of course, it wasn't really anywhere near finished.

The second draft involved simply running the first draft through a spell-checker. The third draft was a big one. I printed the whole manuscript and went through it editing in pencil before making the amendments on computer. By this time of course I had 150,000 words under my belt, which was considerably more than when I started, and I'd like to think my writing style had improved a little over that time. The result was a manuscript that from a distance looked like someone had simply shaded the whole thing in pencil. I was pretty ruthless, and whole sections were either entirely re-written or removed altogether if I decided they didn't actually add anything to the story. Even where I was happy with the plot, there was hardly a single sentence that didn't get tweaked or reworked to some degree. It was quite a long-winded process.

The third draft

The fourth draft was more about reading the manuscript as a whole and checking that the plot made sense and everything fitted together. Of course, I still found plenty more linguistic amendments to make at the same time. Throughout the editing process there were a number of occasions where I came across a plot-point that didn't quite make sense. The temptation is to add detail to explain it in order to preserve what you've already got, but then often you find that introduces further problems that lead to further additions and eventually the whole thing becomes very contrived. I learned early on that it's better to simply re-write the original awkward point or lose it altogether.

It was at this point that I finally thought the book could be ready for other people to read it. Well, that's not completely accurate: I still hated the idea of anyone else seeing it, since it certainly didn't feel finished, but I had resigned myself to the necessity of getting an outsider's opinion. I got some of my friends to read it and provide feedback, which proved to be extremely useful. When you're as intimately familiar with something as you are with your own work it can be hard to tell how someone reading it for the first time is going to understand it.

The fifth draft was a response to that feedback, as I cleared up things that had been misunderstood and changed the parts that hadn't been liked. After that I kind of sat on it for a while. During this time I was planning out the remaining four books of The Malkovari War in quite some detail, and I had actually started on the first draft of the second book (it's immensely satisfying after so much editing to actually get back to writing afresh). In the process I had become a lot clearer about the direction things were going and the themes that I wanted to develop more, and so I finally produced a sixth draft in which I made sure that the groundwork was properly laid for what was to come.

After the sixth draft I got some more reader feedback before embarking almost immediately on the seventh draft. At this point I had a clear plan in mind for publishing, and so I knew that this was going to be the last edit. The fear of finally revealing it to the public has driven this to become rather more of a re-write than I was originally expecting, but things are moving. Eight more chapters and one epilogue to go.

Please bear with me a little longer. I think it's going to be worth it.

Work-in-Progress

Right, here we are: my new website and new blog.

I'm currently half way through the seventh and final draft of The Two Empires. This last rewrite is party based on feedback from the last person to have read the manuscript, but I'm also fixing a few minor plot points and improving sentences here and there. I'm happy with my current design for the cover, though I might tweak things a little more before publication.  Other than that, I just need to put together the front and back matter and then the book itself will be complete.

I've been building this site as a break from editing. I was originally planning on coding it from scratch, but I'm very much an amateur web designer and I could have spent twenty hours or more on something that would at best have been just good enough.  Instead I opted to try Squarespace, and so far I'm very pleased with the result. There's no way I could have produced something like this on my own.

I've got a couple of ideas in mind for blog posts.  I want to write a bit about how The Two Empires got to this point, and I also want to put together something about the process of self-publishing online.  Expect to see both in the next few days.  Beyond that, I intend to use this blog to keep people updated about what's going on with the book (and future books!), and to share whatever else happens to be on my thoughts.