Tube Riders is on sale through April for $0.99c

Tube Riders will be on sale for the first half of April (and longer, depending on sales) as part of the build up to the release of the second part of the saga, Tube Riders: Exile, in the summer. The book is finished and is currently in revision.

The three covers - the new one, the old paperback and the old ebook 

As I've blogged about before, Tube Riders is no longer part of Amazon's Select program and therefore will not be offered for free at any time in the near future. Still, $0.99c is within most budgets and that works out at roughly six pages/cent so you're getting a good deal. Plus, its awesome. If I could, I'd lower it even more to like $0.50c, because this is all about getting readers not getting rich, but the lowest Amazon will let me is $0.99 so you'll have to handle it. Remember, if you don't have a Kindle its available for the same price on all over platforms now. The quickest way is to get it from Smashwords, but you can also get it from any major online retailer like Barnes & Noble or Kobo.

If you're new to the series and have seen the split parts London, Bristol and Cornwall on Amazon, while I'm quite happy if you buy them for a combined total of $6.97 (I'll get lunch on you!) remember you can get the whole thing now for less than a dollar. If you've bought these mistakenly thinking that Bristol and Cornwall are parts two and three of the series, then apologies for that. Remember you can refund your purchases from Amazon within a week. For this very same reason if you want to read any of my short stories I really won't resent you if you buy them, read them and then refund them, as long as you promise to tell people how great they are and that buying The Tube Riders, The Man Who Built the World or any of my forthcoming longer works is a great idea. Most of them are 2,000 - 6,000 words so you should be able to get through them in a single sitting. The reason I have Tube Riders on Amazon in three split parts is purely for visibility and marketing, it's not an attempt at a money grab, although at 65k, 68k, and 38k, the three individual parts are longer than many so-called series books anyway, so if you want to tackle them one at a time I really won't mind.

Anyway, that's it for now. By the way, check out my new progress meters on the side of the blog, just below the new releases mailing list (which you really should sigh up for!). These are partly as motivation for me and partly so you can see how I'm getting on. While I sucked at maths at school I'm a bit of a stats man (hence my love of cricket) so I'll probably update them every couple of days or so. I only have one up at the moment but look out for more!

Okay, back to it...

Chris Ward
8th April 2013

Tube Riders: Exile - What happens next?

Yesterday, after five and a half months, of writing, I finished Part 2 in my Tube Riders series, titled Exile. It rocked in at 145,166 words or in readers' terms 530 pages.

So, the first draft is done. What happens next?

I see a lot of writers just rushing their books out, sending their first drafts off to an editor the day after finishing. I'm going to go old skool with mine and leave it on a virtual shelf to mature for a bit. The draft is done, but I have to decide if I'm really happy with the story as it is. For example, less than twelve hours after finishing I came up with a couple of small changes to make in the last scene, including one important confrontation that wasn't in the original manuscript. These are changes I'm going to make and there will be others, too. My drafts tend to be fairly sparse, so there's a lot of room to add stuff in.

I'm aiming to let it sit for about six weeks before I actually read it over. That should be  enough time for me to look at it more objectively. Once I start reading I'll aim to tighten the existing text, add more detail, get rid of as many basic typos as I can (my first drafts are littered) make sure the characters - particularly the new ones - maintain the same "voice" all the way through, hunt down and kill any plot holes, and try to make some of the more unbelievable sections as believable as possible.

Then, once I'm satisfied with it, I'm going to make it ready for the world.

1. Beta readers

These will be a small group of people who get to read through the draft. I have a couple of volunteers but I'd like five or six so if anyone else would like to ...

These people will have a direct influence on the final story. They get to tell me which bits sucked, which bits are stupid, which characters are lame. If I agree, I'll fix it.  If they all say the same thing and I don't agree, I'll probably still fix it. While it's unlikely I'll agree to bring a dead character back to life, or a kill a character that survives, I could be persuaded to kill them differently, or give them a bit more of a beating in lieu of actually killing them. I'm open to suggestions!

2. Copy editing

I edited Tube Riders 1 myself and I kind of got away with it because it had been three years since I had looked at it and the whole manuscript felt like someone else had written it. I was able to edit it as if I was editing a book for a stranger, but time it'll be a little more difficult, because I don't want to wait three years before getting this book out. A copy editor will aim to tighten up the text in sections I've missed, spot repeated words, that kind of thing.

3. Proofreading 

I may or may not get the same person to do the proofreading, but I learned the hard way that you can't do it yourself.  When I first put Tube Riders out last year it had more than a 100 errors in it, and it took me six different volunteer proofreaders to get them all out. This time I'm going to get it done before I release the book. It's way too important to go out with errors in this time. I'm learning slowly, but I am learning.

4. Formatting

Same as the above - I put Tube Riders out myself and the first edition had some bad formatting errors, sections that were all in bold, sections that didn't have intents, etc. Again, I'll probably pay someone to do it for me this time.

5. Cover!

Obviously a book needs a cover. I'll probably start planning the cover while I'm doing all of the above so that there is no delay once the book's ready. For this one I'm going to get Marta Banks on the cover as she's my leading lady. Not sure how yet, but it'll make a nice change from the scary Huntsman on part 1.

6. Release

I'm going to put the book out on all formats this time, not exclusively through Amazon. This will mean that I can't do free promos, but I will be able to do bargain books and also giveaways I arrange myself.  While I like the KDP free promos as a way of reaching a wider audience, I've been hit by far too many bad reviews by people who don't even like my type of book yet just download it because it's free and then complain about it. I've had enough of that. If a sci-fi fan hates it that's fine, but I'm tired of people who don't even like sci-fi slamming it because it somehow didn't manage to transcend a genre that they don't even enjoy reading. Tube Riders 1 will also be coming out of Select at the next opportunity, which is late Feb. My standalone books will stay in for now, as I don't mind a hit or two on those.

What am I going to do until March?

Write! I have a ton of stuff that's been put on the backburner while I got this done. I have a novella to finish, a short story collection and two novels to edit for starters. Then I'm going to play around about, maybe write some poetry, or a few stories about my cat ... We'll see. Once this book is done I'll get back to work on part three. Looking forward to it!

CW
10th Feb 2013

What makes a good character?

What makes a good character?

I’ve been reading a couple of books recently (yes, really) and a couple of thoughts came to mind regarding characters, their development, and the empathy readers have with them.

In one book I’m reading, a YA dystopia, the male lead’s only recognizable feature is his spiky hair.  On top of this he appears to be good-looking.  No surprise there.  The female lead is a teenage girl who appears to be Bella out of Twilight with a different name.  Several reviewers have mentioned “great characters”.  Um, why?  The guy is a TV presenter transposed into a sci-fi novel.  The girl is a high-school girl of regular attractiveness and intelligence who will obviously at some point get with the guy.  There’s nothing at all that makes either of them special or makes them stand out.

And perhaps here we have the answer.

Do readers, particularly young adult readers, merely want a character that they can pretend to be?  So that they can pretend to be in the book itself, interacting with the other characters as if they were real?

Another recent book I read, a so-called sci-fi classic, had a review bemoaning the lack of character development.  The book was set on a foreign planet, and revolved around a guy finding out what was going on in his world.  Which he did, and it was great.  Why would I need the guy to have some kind of big change in his life?  The story wasn't just about the guy, it was about the whole world around him.

Another issue I have is with empathy.  Matt Cassidy, the central character in The Man Who Built the World (that's him looking miserable on the cover), is an alcoholic borderline wife-beater who hates pretty much everything.  He’s intentionally detestable, in fact I went out of my way to give him no redeeming features.  The point of the book is such that through his story you discover why he is how he is, and whether he can find redemption. You're not supposed to like him.

I recently had someone pull out of reviewing the book because they couldn’t identify with him.  While I fully respect the reviewer’s opinion this pleased me in a certain way because I don’t want my readers to identify with him.  I want them to pity or hate or be repulsed by him.

I don’t write books with swimwear models or high school nice guys for characters.  If you find one, you can be sure he or she won’t last long.  Charles de Molay, star of my favorite of my unpublished novels, Hooks, is a cripple.  Dan Barker in Head of Words (forthcoming) is mentally insane.  Even the Tube Riders have their issues.  Marta - the only one close to being good-looking, hardly ever gets to wash and her dreadlocks are a case of more grime than intention.  Switch has, for want of a better expression, a fucked up eye, and Paul is balding and overweight.  It’s not just about their looks, either, but their actions.  In a lot of books nothing seriously bad ever happens to the main characters, or they never do anything bad, take your pick.  In Tube Riders, Marta sleeps with guys to pay her rent (or at least she did before the book starts).  Paul does even worse.  Switch kills without thinking whether his victim deserved it or not.

A reviewer recently said my book contained “real people”.  This was perhaps the biggest compliment someone could ever give me.  It doesn't matter if they liked it or not, they got it.  In real life people don’t always do the right thing, and they certainly aren’t always good-looking.  For every Che Guevara (cool enough to spawn a billion t-shirts) or Aung Sung Suu Kyi (gorgeous - at least in her youth, damn) there are hundreds or thousands of 'heroes' that are nothing much to look at.  It is totally possible for someone who isn’t cool or an oil painting to have an adventure, to be a hero.

So what do I think makes a good character?

I used to suffer from something I call the Steve Syndrome.  I would have a couple of main characters who were more distinctive then everyone else would be a Steve (apologies to anyone called Steve!).  This would be a character who had no real features or definition and often a generic name (the first character I identified as having this problem, in my third novel, Resort, was called Steve - hence the name).  In Tube Riders, both Paul and Simon were originally Steves.  Marta and Switch were always pretty well-defined, but I had to make a real effort to make Simon and Paul distinct.  Paul I made fat and more unattractive, while with Simon I went the other way, making him more feminine, almost androgynous.

Therefore, the first thing that I believe is important is memorability (is that even a word?!).  A character has to be memorable.  And not just by having a cute smile - that’s not memorable, it’s generic - they have to have some feature or mannerism (or both) which makes them stand out.  It doesn’t have to be good, and it doesn’t have to be bad.

Also extremely important is voice.  People talk differently.  Some people swear, some people don’t.  Some people say certain words more often than others.  Some people talk in long sentences, others talk in short, clipped phrases.  You should (within reason) be able to write a three- or four- way dialogue without using any identifying dialogue tags yet still have the reader know who is speaking each time.  If you can do that, you’ve got it.

Also very important to me (as you’ll notice from my character descriptions above) is flaws.  I hate good-looking, perfect characters.  Boooorrrriing.  Have you ever met anyone who was perfect?  (Actually, I have met a couple of people who were, and god they were dull).  Perfect characters are only allowed in comedy, because their very perfection can make them hilarious (see my novella series, Beat Down!, for an example).

So what do people think?  Obviously few people agree with me.  I’ve sold 27 books this month so far.  How many has Stephanie Meyer sold?  A billion?  Even the book I was complaining about above has probably sold about 200.  So, I’m likely wrong (except in my own head of course!), but I’d love to hear your ideas on what you think makes a good character.

CW

27 Nov 2012

Humour in The Tube Riders

Okay, so its a pretty bleak novel, but there are some nuggets of humour in The Tube Riders.

Here's one of my favourite scenes, Frank vs Switch, from Chapter Twelve.

The others stood around while Frank examined Switch.  With his bloody t-shirt off and the wound wiped down, Marta was relieved the blood had made it look worse than it was.  A thin cut about two inches long clung to the side of his hip, a little wider at the top than the bottom.

‘I fucking twisted on it and pushed it in deeper,’ Switch said, as way of explanation.

‘You were lucky,’ Frank said, prodding it with a surgical instrument.  It went in through the fat on your lower back and got stuck in the muscle here,’ he said, prodding Switch’s side and making him wince.  ‘It was a small knife, I take it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You pulled it out yourself?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You still got it?’

‘In my one remaining shoe.’  He kicked it off and held it up.

Marta smiled in spite of herself.  Typical Switch.

Frank plucked it out and held it up to the light.  ‘Nice,’ he said.  ‘Thrower.  Proper one, too.’

‘You wanna buy it?’

Frank smiled.  He looked around at the others.  ‘Well, I’m guessing Paul said you had money just to get you in the door.  ‘I’ll trade it for stitching you up.’

‘Done.’

Frank got to work cleaning the wound.  Switch yelped in pain as he dabbed at the exposed flesh with TCP antiseptic liquid, but the only thing he could offer to numb the pain was a shot of some cheap homebrewed whiskey.

‘I don’t know what’s worse, the pain or this piss,’ Switch growled, gulping it down.  Simon, who took an experimental swig after him, couldn’t testify to the pain but had to agree the taste was pretty bad.

‘I could put you under, but I don’t think you’ve got enough of those knives to pay me for it,’ Frank said.  ‘And plus, by the look of you kids, I’d say you want this chump on his feet pretty soon.’

Their silence was affirmation.

Frank sewed Switch up, dressed the injury and gave him some antibiotics to keep it free of infection.  ‘Do not lose these,’ he said.  ‘Take one a day, and do not forget.  If it starts to itch, or pus starts to come out of the wound, double up for a day.  It should seal itself over in a week, and then you’re safe.  Until then, take care.  If it gets infected and you can’t get to a doctor, well, you’re fucked.’  Frank cackled.  Marta couldn’t tell how serious he was.

Switch climbed down from the table.  ‘Thanks old man, I owe you one.’

Frank raised an eyebrow.  ‘Many people say that, few deliver.’

‘Well, one day I might.’

‘I hope so.  Take it easy, kid.’

‘And you.’

Switch followed Simon and Jess out into the hall.  Frank turned to Paul.  ‘How’s your brother?’

Paul shrugged.  ‘Still there.  Starting to raise hell.’

Frank nodded.  ‘Good, good.  Keep him alive, he’ll be leading the revolution one day.’  He patted Paul’s shoulder and started to laugh again.

‘Thank you for your help,’ Marta said to Frank in the doorway.

‘No problem, young lady,’ he said.  ‘I just suggest that whatever you were doing for that to happen you try to avoid it in the future.’

‘We’ll try,’ Marta said.  ‘If only it was that easy.’

Frank gazed off into the distance.  His eyes grew suddenly wistful.  ‘Don’t give up on this country just yet,’ he said.  ‘Keep your heads down, one day them dark clouds are gonna clear.’

‘We hope so,’ Marta said.

Frank nodded.  He looked at Switch.  ‘You.  Come here.’

Switch sauntered closer.  ‘Yeah, what?’

Before Marta could blink Frank’s hand had gone to Switch’s throat, the throwing knife held there, hard against the skin.  Switch’s good eye went wide.  There was a collective intake of breath, and then Frank gave a gap-toothed smile and cackled a laugh.  He dropped his hand.  ‘You’ll need this metal more than I will, I think,’ he said, holding out the knife, handle first.  ‘A present from an old man.’

Switch took the offered knife and tucked it under his shirt, his composure once more unruffled.  ‘Thanks.  I don’t suppose you have any spare shoes around?’

Frank pouted.  ‘I doubt we’re the same size, kid.’  He looked around at the others.  ‘Now, if I can give you kids some advice, stay on your guard.  Don’t trust anyone.’  He cocked his head and flashed a smile.  ‘Except me.’

      With that he nodded goodbye and went back inside.  The door slammed behind them without sentiment and several latches thudded back across.

Although he only appears in two early scenes, Frank is one of my favourite characters.  While I can't say exactly where or when, it's pretty likely he'll pop up in later books.

The Tube Riders (full novel) is free October 5th through October 7th.

CW

4th Oct 2012

Great Review for Tube Riders

My first British review for Tube Riders came in and I'm pretty pleased with it.  I've submitted the book to a lot of bloggers but The Future Fire is also a well-respected small press magazine.  After I subbed it there for review back in June I read through a few of their previous reviews.  It became quite apparently that they wouldn't take any crap and would call a spade a spade.  I hear a lot of reviewers giving it the "well, I feel bad if I have to give less than four stars" line and while I understand the desire to be nice on the other hand this keeps a lot of junk afloat when some writers really need to be told, "Sorry, you suck.  Go away for five years and practice and then come back."  As a result, a lot of good books get drowned out by the noise given off by all the crap.

So I was a little nervous.  Would I get a good one, or would I get canned?

Here's what they said -

http://reviews.futurefire.net/2012/09/ward-tube-riders-2012.html

The Tube Riders, written by Chris Ward and available through Amazon Digital Services, is a gritty dystopian novel set in future Britain, known as Mega Britain. Now a corrupt, deliberately isolated and socially devastated island, the government rules oppressively and the poor scavenge for food under a persistent threat of suspicion by the Department of Civil Affairs—almost like an Orwellian Thought Police outfit.

The novel’s focus is a gang known as The Tube Riders. Walled within a devastated London—now called ‘London Greater Urban Area’—the group have developed a high-risk game that involves leaping onto the side of moving trains from underground platforms and hanging on for as long as they can. The head of this gang is Marta, who took over leadership from her missing brother. She is supported by the experienced and friendly Paul, the dangerous yet highly loyal Switch and Simon, who is soon joined by his girlfriend Jess. Part way into the book, Paul’s 12 year-old brother, Owen completes the group. Despite most of the gang being relatively friendly—misfits who desperately try and keep their heads down in the civil dystopia that otherwise envelopes them—The Tube Riders appear to have a notorious reputation which is rarely challenged.

This changes dramatically however when they are betrayed by Dan, who leaves the gang in the first chapter after an argument with Switch. Dan approaches rival gang The Cross Jumpers (who jump across tracks in front of oncoming trains)—and tells them of the underground station where The Tube Riders are located in order to curry favour. The Cross Jumpers, led by the deranged Deggo, move to attack but The Tube Riders manage to escape by jumping onto the side of a train and heading down a tunnel. They jump off in unfamiliar territory, only to witness a brutal crime at the hands of government agents. The Tube Riders, as witnesses, subsequently become wanted individuals. Their survival is threatened further by the Huntsmen, biologically-altered, government-bred killing machines who track their prey like dogs. The story delves into The Tube Riders escape and beyond as they carry devastating evidence, film footage captured on camera, and ultimately seek to expose the corrupt authorities.

The novel, as with any traditional dystopia, is a satirically critical perspective that relates to contemporary society. Mega Britain is a grotesque corporate monstrosity that seems like the result of staunch right-wing capitalism and authorities drunk on maintaining a pedantic level order and control, regardless of costs. The class system is polarised more than ever, the poverty is both stark and foreboding and the iron fisted authority often seems to have it’s roots in contemporary right-wing governmentality. In many ways it’s an even bleaker society than that of Moore’s V for Vendetta, and just as striking in written word than animation.

I enjoy analysing these kind of novels from a feminist perspective and The Tube Riders is an interesting study. The gang leaders Marta and Deggo—both powerful characters in very different ways—make the story interesting in that the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides are represented by strong female characters. The sinister government authorities, led by the Governor (think of a very hands-on Prime Minister!) are resoundingly ‘male’ and yet seemingly peripheral to the main character development. It is, by no means, a feminist novel and yet I saw little that differentiated women in a discriminatory way. Society has a distinct phallocentric hegemony and so any perceived sexism is more a factor of the dystopic society, rather than any casual subconscious implication by the author. In many respects the fact that characters are or are not female becomes mostly invisible; you have those which are strong, sensitive, violent, caring and determined—gender is not a label that is associated by default with any. If a reader considers the caring mentality of Paul, the fierce loyalty of Switch and the strength of Marta, such qualities are actually interchangeable regardless of biological sex.

While many dystopian novels export a moral of some kind, a classic message or a political pamphlet of some kind, I felt that The Tube Riders was just a very good adventure story. The pace is as relentless as the trains themselves and the narrative physically throws characters around like puppets. The story is very much a work of popular fiction, a text that takes the reader to the dark and scarily recognisable Mega Britain and yet lets it’s characters shine through brightly in spite of it. It’s perhaps then a tale of raw human determination overcoming adversity more than anything grander.

In conclusion, The Tube Riders is a tense, gritty and enthralling thrill of a dystopian novel, the break-neck speed of which is the kind that refuses to warn you of upcoming bumps and denies you the breath to secure your seat belt. You often feel jolted, shocked and yet sometimes deeply touched by the very humanistic adventure it describes. If you enjoy solid British sci-fi, or like me, are a sucker for terribly bleak yet well written dystopia, the book is a joy to read and something that really does stay with you long after you turn the final page."

I'll take that.  In fact, I'll quite happily take that every time.  It's certainly given me a lot to think about, especially as the sequel is now being written.

Just a shame hardly anyone else as read it, but I can live in hope that with a few more reviews like that people might start to pay attention.

CW

14 Sept 2012

My Author's Proof from Createspace - pics & comments

##Please note: this post is pretty old and the pictures are out of date. I've just added a new post here with some pictures of my current paperbacks and the updated formatting. It would be useful to read both posts and compare the differences.##

I was very pleased to come home from work yesterday (April 19th) to find that my author's proof copy of The Tube Riders had finally arrived.  The estimated arrival date was Sunday 15th, so it was four days late.  However, as I live in Japan and was ordering it through Createspace in America I expected it to be delayed, and four days is not so bad.

Apart from a couple of dents on the front from transportation it looked wonderful.  I was expecting it to be a little more flimsy like a regular paperback but quality of the binding is more akin to a textbook and could take a bit of a beating.

Inside the book the paper and text were exceptional quality.  For the formatting I used a downloadable template from the Createspace website but the text, headers, footers etc, were all done by myself using a simple Word document.  I was very impressed.  I don't know exactly what grade of paper was used but it was just as good as anything in any hardback books I have, with a slightly grainy texture rather than gloss.

Here's a more close up look at the text.  I used Times New Roman size 12.  I was wondering whether to use a slightly smaller text for the final version as on some lines the justification has spaced the words out a little much, particularly between sentences.  Also, the longer the book is, the higher the production costs, however while I could make the text a lot smaller, and drop the header and footer to make it perhaps 40 pages shorter, I think it would make it an inferior product and probably paying that extra dollar is worth it.

The cover image was purchased from an artist I found on deviantart.com for a very reasonable fee (for non-exclusive rights) but the cover design is a Createspace template.  There is a system where you can pay them to design a specific cover for you, or you can upload your own, but I think mine looks really nice with the deep red of the train on the black background.  Obviously you could change the background and text colours if you wanted to, however you couldn't change the size or the font of the text, only whether it was in capitals or not.  I think there were about 15 different templates you could chose from, but I liked this one the best.

Here's a shot of the spine.  I had no options on text size, only colour and capitals/non-capitals.  It wasn't even generated until after the upload of the text.  I would have liked it to be a little bigger and I think its slightly off-centre but I think in general it looks okay.

Here's the back cover.  Again, I had the choice of colour and style (and size this time) although not font.  The ISBN is given to you by Createspace.  Some templates had an option for an author photo on the back, but not this one, and I didn't really want one anyway.

Due to the nature of it being print-on-demand (POD) the production costs are higher and therefore my retail price will reflect that.  I think the minimum I can charge to even make a small profit is $13.99 but to be honest, the quality of the book is exceptional and I wouldn't shirk at paying that for a regular trade paperback of this size and quality anyway.  However, author copies are cheaper at just over $7 (of course pricing depends on the size and length of your book) so it would be possible to buy them in batches and sell them privately.  

Based on what I've received I would not hesitate to recommend Createspace (an Amazon subsidiary), although the only downside is that it the only Amazon it is available through is the USA version.  However, UK customers could buy it direct from Createspace (as I did, even though I live in Japan), which I would actually prefer because my profit margin is higher, however it probably wouldn't affect the book's ranking on Amazon.

Overall, I was delighted to receive a copy of my book in print.  I have to admit I shed a tear when I opened it.  I'm not actually expecting to sell many copies, particularly when the ebook is currently only priced $2.99, but I think its important to have a version available, plus it means I am able to submit it as a review copy to magazines, as well as do reader giveaways, etc.  The only downside is that I live in Japan so shipping costs are high.  I paid for express delivery which was just over $12 (for a single copy) but it still took 19 days.  Obviously the more you buy the cheaper it gets, and if you're buying from inside America it would be a lot cheaper anyway.