The BRITISH & IRISH Writers' Support Thread

[hjmoritzo]

Hello from Somerset, land of history, mystery and the smell of the country air (or as it's more commonly known, manure!).

[Authoress]

Hello from Somerset, land of history, mystery and the smell of the country air (or as it's more commonly known, manure!).

Where the cider apples grow 

[Shane]

Chiming in from Cork. We hosted the Eurovision once.

[guest819]

For those of you who have .co.uk or EU-based domain names here is an interesting snippet that might interest you.

"as a result of GDPR Nominet have automatically redacted your personal information from the WHOIS database. This information is therefore no longer available publicly and only law enforcement and approved parties can view it."

This gives EU domain name holders privacy without paying extra for it (such as 123.org do) when it's an automatic GDPR legal requirement.

[WordWrassler]

Londoner here though currently living in Devon.

[Trioxin 245]

I'm Irish born and bred.  Grew up in Dublin but live in the countryside now. 

Culchie! 

[Fee]

I'm Irish born and bred.  Grew up in Dublin but live in the countryside now. 

Culchie! 

  - As far as the locals are concerned, I'll always be a jackeen.

Hi to all the other Irish and British on the board.   

[garygibsonsf]

Scottish here, living in Taipei. Originally from Glasgow. Trad author with ten books published, but making gradual headway into self-publishing, first with a short story collection and possibly later with books published online as and when they're written.

I'm curious if anyone has been following the recent decision by the European Commission to recommend giving taxation of digital ebooks and newspapers a swift, hard shove into oblivion. 

My short story collection sells reasonably well, but 90% of my sales are in the Uk, which means literally hundreds of pounds of my income has gone to an outdated tax I regard as punitive on reading and learning and the uptake of digital forms of communication.

References: https://publishingperspectives.com/2018/10/european-publishing-welcomes-ecofin-ebook-taxation-decision/

and

http://www.marcusward.co/vat-e-books-to-be-reduced-rated/

[spin52]

Hello from Somerset, land of history, mystery and the smell of the country air (or as it's more commonly known, manure!).

One of my sons lives in Somerset, the other in Devon.
Back to the roundabout discussion, I was pleased to see the Magic Roundabout in Swindon at the top (possibly should be the bottom) of the list. I remember many years ago, travelling to a training course in Swindon and seeing our supervisor going around another segment of the roundabout. How we ever ended up in the same place for the course I'll never know.

[Gerri Attrick]

Is anyone else in the UK having problems with Amazon UK not crediting sales to the Month to Date chart?

It started for me on April 4th and I now have 13 missing sales - i.e. they are shown as units ordered on the Sales Dashboard, but never appear on the MTD. All other stores appear to be working normally it’s just the UK site.
I also published my latest book on the 7th April and added it to Author Central on .com and UK. It was added to the American site fairly quickly, but although AC UK says it’s been added, it still isn’t showing up on my Author Central page.

I’m wondering if I should contact them. The missing sales are all full priced books (£2.99) and that’s a fair chunk of royalties for this prawn to lose.

[Fee]

Hi Gerri,
I've just done a quick tot up of my UK month to date, comparing what's on the sales dashboard if I isolate month to date to what's on the actual month to date section of the reports, and I found that I was down by forty-seven sales.  Things can often take a while to trickle through from the sales dashboard (payments processing slowly or what have you) though, but it does seem like there's a major discrepancy there.  For me it's over a few books and it'd take me a while to figure out which ones.  I'm going to leave it for a few days  to see if one catches up with the other.

I'm hoping it'll sort itself out. If not I'll be joining you in contacting Amazon. I was just thinking my UK total looked a little lower than usual - now I know the reason :(

I'm in Ireland, and we had a bank holiday yesterday - could that, coupled with the Easter weekend, have caused some delays in processing payments, do you think? Was there a bank holiday in the UK yesterday too?

[Gerri Attrick]

Thanks, Fee.

Yes, it was a Bank Holiday here as well. I doubt that that is the explanation, unless all UK staff had a two week Easter Break that started on the 4th of April.  It’s been going on for longer.

I was missing 9 sales when I went to my mum’s for Easter on Good Friday (19th) and it’s now up to 13 sales unaccounted for.

I can check mine on Book Report, so I know exactly which books it relates to, even though I can’t be sure of the dates the sales were made. I’ll give it to the end of this week to see if they miraculously appear. After that, there will be a strongly worded (though probably grovelling) email to Zon.

[Fee]

Ah, I don't have Book Report and have no idea when this started. I just looked at the raw numbers so far until I get a chance to go through it in more detail. I wouldn't have known about it at all had you not posted - so thanks for the heads up. I'll post again if my numbers catch up - or if I have to resort to getting in touch with Amazon.

Here's hoping that it miraculously sorts itself out

[M.J. Mahoney]

Hi all, newbie from the cultural desert of Ipswich, here! Well, I say "desert"; it's more of an inhospitable, sterile moonscape, really...

[Gerri Attrick]

Hi, M J, and welcome. Never been to Ipswich, so I’ll take your word on its lack of cultural delights.

What genre do you write/prefer?

[M.J. Mahoney]

Hi Gerri! I write "supernatural adventure" stories, I guess. That's the nearest genre I can find, anyway. About fifteen years ago, someone coined the genre "The New Weird", but the term never seemed to take off and it's definitely not on the BISAC list. In fact, I was sure it was a definite genre until the fateful moment someone actually asked me to explain it.

"You know, it's a bit like The Rivers of London meets Angel Heart. No, I mean, if China Mieville rewrote Big Trouble in Little China and played it straight. You know? A bit like that."

[Blank stares]

"Look, it's a bit Tomb Raidery, a bit Neverwhere-esque, just a bit Lovecraftian... Where are you going? It is a genre, I swear!"

[The Doctor]

Hi M J, nice to see another addition to the Brit List. 

I think I've heard of New Weird, or something similar.

I'd pay to read a Tomb Raider-meets-Neverwhere-meets-Lovecraft. 

I'm writing a Trainspotting-meets-Dracula story at the moment but it's not as Weird as it sounds.   

[M.J. Mahoney]

Hullo Doctor!

Dracula meets Trainspotting sounds like a good call. Vampires need to get all sordid and grimy again, I reckon. Are you going to do the Scots dialect thing, like Irvine Welsh? Or set it as a series of interconnected mini-stories?

Well, you can find my novelette "The Talented Man" on Amazon (and everywhere else) for free, so you don't even have to pay. (Security contractor, Kieron Rose, tries to hold it together in a run-down Cairo mansion on the border between worlds. Cultists, looted antiquities, supernatural forces, the whole nine yards...)

The sequel, "Eventide", is out in the wild too. (Set in London and following Rose's dodgy former colleague, Holden, as he tries to atone for his past and survive against the odds. Victorian occultists, Egyptian-revival temples, revenants roaming the underground and evil spirits in the night...) 

[The Doctor]

Hullo Doctor!

Dracula meets Trainspotting sounds like a good call. Vampires need to get all sordid and grimy again, I reckon. Are you going to do the Scots dialect thing, like Irvine Welsh? Or set it as a series of interconnected mini-stories?

Well, you can find my novelette "The Talented Man" on Amazon (and everywhere else) for free, so you don't even have to pay. (Security contractor, Kieron Rose, tries to hold it together in a run-down Cairo mansion on the border between worlds. Cultists, looted antiquities, supernatural forces, the whole nine yards...)

The sequel, "Eventide", is out in the wild too. (Set in London and following Rose's dodgy former colleague, Holden, as he tries to atone for his past and survive against the odds. Victorian occultists, Egyptian-revival temples, revenants roaming the underground and evil spirits in the night...)

Hey, M J

I'll be sure to check those books out.

I'm going for the Irvine-Welsh dialect, but not as intense (honestly, as a born and bred Scot, I struggled to read Trainspotting on occasion.). I'll put a small translation list at the beginning and end of the book, but as though written by the sweary Scottish vampire himself. Should be entertaining!

[M.J. Mahoney]

I'm going for the Irvine-Welsh dialect, but not as intense (honestly, as a born and bred Scot, I struggled to read Trainspotting on occasion.). I'll put a small translation list at the beginning and end of the book, but as though written by the sweary Scottish vampire himself. Should be entertaining!

Yeah, dialect is always tricky -- I like the idea of the character-narrated vocab list. The protag in my novelette is a Yorkshireman and someone did say that they kept forgetting that fact until some of his dialogue made it obvious, which was a little jarring. Well, I couldn't exactly make him as Yorkshire as Sean Bean stuffing ferrets down his trousers whilst narrating the memoirs of Thora Hird, so I thought I'd just run with it.

Good luck with the story, anyway -- sound like a great idea! (I hope you appreciate the lack of Scottish vampire puns in this post. It's a disease I struggle with...)

[wildcreature]

I just joined. I haven't been to a writer's site for a long time. I'm excited. I was born in Northern Ireland, have cousins in Southern Ireland. Have lived just outside Edinburgh and also in England. All of that was a long time ago I've lived in US for years,  but I miss the UK and Ireland, and think I could get both a UK and Irish passport if needed. At the minute I'm a lonely American.

When I first published my novel (8 years ago) it sold better in the UK. Now it has withered. I see you are using actual names, sorry, I guess I may change my name later. I think I'm going to run into some friends here because was on kboards for years.

[JB Rowley]

I'm making my first trip to Britain in September this year- long way to go for an Aussie! Am going for my niece's wedding but have a few extra days to explore. Top of my to-see list is Kew Gardens. I also want to visit Tooting as it features in my next book. Anybody here from Tooting?