My Computer Flies
How my eBook's unusual formatting turned out well for print books too
September 2009.
Here I am sitting in the family garden I left 40 years ago. It would be sinful to sit inside on beautiful days like these. So I’ve moved my office outside: a chair, a little table, and my laptop.
What am I doing here? When my mother’s health began to decline a year ago, we decided to move back to the UK, Lena and I, after a long stint in the Middle East. It wasn’t just about the health issues: we both felt It was time to move on to the next phase of our life — whatever that might be — now our kids had flown the nest.
Talking of flying, the sparrows at the far end of the garden are getting used to seeing me out here every day, now I’ve been here for a month, nursing my mother after her operation. They probably think I’m another of her gnomes. But a special giant one, who eats biscuits and leaves crumbs on plates. They sit on the fence alongside and I stop typing. Two days ago one of the birds hopped onto the table to explore. Today for the first time, one is feeding from my hand. I dare hardly breathe.
Other visitors are not so welcome. My laptop is old and battered, but the light and heat from its LEDs still send out a siren call to the garden’s many midges. Not content with landing on the screen, these tiny creatures find a way to burrow beneath its outer protective layer — where they die. Looking, for all the world, like tiny speech-marks.
And now it’s becoming an annoyance as I scroll through the pages of the book I’m writing. Is that a speech-mark I see before me, or is it just a new fly? Proof-reading is going to be a nightmare. I can’t get rid of the insects. And I can’t afford a new laptop. So what am I going to do …?
* * *
What was the book I was writing, all those years ago? The one that unexpectedly turned up when we were unpacking everything we’d left in storage while we were living abroad. My typed manuscript for The Lebanese Troubles, untouched and forgotten since the 1980s. As I re-read my half-completed novel it became blindingly obvious what the next phase of my life would be: I needed to get the book finished. This was the new project I was looking for. And with Lena tied to her job in Cambridge while I was down in Kent, what better time to write those final chapters?
In the end, the answer to my midge problem was obvious. If I couldn’t get rid of the insects, I had to get rid of the speech-marks. Breaking with convention, of course, but absolutely in line with my thinking about the revolutionary new opportunities that digital publishing offered, and the new type of reader who was emerging.
As I sat writing in the garden, it was just over two years since, in November 2007, Amazon had launched the Kindle and thrown the doors open to independent authors with the launch of its self-publishing platform, the Digital Text Platform. For both writers and readers, Amazon changed everything. It meant that anyone could publish a book — and they did: in 2025 it’s estimated that 200,000 new books were published in the UK alone, roughly double the figure for the pre-Kindle period. But perhaps even more importantly, the digital book changed our reading habits. This is what I wrote in a blog post back then:
“We need to change the way we write to take account of the way people today read. With their e-readers, mobiles, tablets, they’re on the move, going to work, between appointments, catching up in the lunch-break. They’re surrounded by distractions. They only have a few minutes.”
So how did this affect my writing style?
“For people on the go, speed and ease of reading are both important. So I try to eliminate anything that slows the reader down.”
I’d already re-edited the early version of the manuscript to change the way I handled dialogue. This was my thinking.
“When we speak to each other in real life, we speak and react, speak and react. Of course there are thought processes too, but they’re almost unconscious. Yet novelists insist on telling us how to interpret what people say, how they’re speaking (he explained, choosing his words carefully). To me, that seems like spoon-feeding (he added, derisively). By cutting out all authorial interventions and interpretations, then I will not only simulate real life, but I’ll force my readers to make decisions. They will have to determine for themselves the speaker’s tone of voice, what was intended, whether it was a truth or a lie. This, I feel, will draw my readers right into the story and trigger emotional responses to my characters — love and hate, pity and anger, trust and fear.”
Perhaps I could go further. What if I never mentioned who was speaking but left that up to the reader too? It would mean careful stage management. I’d need to make sure that characters had distinctive voices, and that not too many people were in the spotlight at the same time. But if I could succeed, perhaps the author could disappear from the book entirely, leaving the characters to speak for themselves. Making me more like a film director than an author.
The decision to drop speech-marks was simply another step in the process, an attempt to de-clutter my eBook. But what could I use instead? I remembered one of my favourite books from my schooldays, an A-level text in French, La Peste by Albert Camus. He’d used a — to indicate that someone was speaking. Ah, the dashing French!
As I moved closer to completing the book I was lucky enough to be working with a talented on-line group of authors. The way it worked was that writers posted their chapters, one at a time, and other writers reviewed. Normally we reciprocated. Some reviewers focused on style and accuracy: they were my copy-editors. Some focused on consistency and readability: they were important too, because from their response I could see whether my style experiments — particularly with dialogue — were working. Instead of one editor, I had forty.
So having made all these changes to dialogue, I tested readability with my writer-critics. Some of them complained bitterly, finding the approach too dense. But then I discovered that if I left a blank line between each new speaker, as well as the introductory dash, objections evaporated. A Goodreads reviewer later wrote:
“There were no he saids or she saids — which you think could get confusing, but it doesn’t. The dialogue was so good that you could tell who was speaking by the way they were talking.”
If I’d started from the standpoint of a print book, I’d never have considered leaving extra line-spaces — think of the poor trees and the extra cost. But with a digital book, extra line-spaces have no cost. And that’s why, when I self-published The Lebanese Troubles in 2010, I didn’t contemplate trying to publish a print book. As I saw it, this was a digital book, through and through, written for a digital audience.
* * *
May 2026
For reasons I’ve explained elsewhere, I’ve decided that it’s important to republish the book now, retitled as The Foreign Aide, repackaged, re-edited and slightly modified. But times have changed since 2010.
Back then, although I was excited by the opportunities eBooks offered, I never imagined that they would replace printed books. Many of the books in my library—paperbacks and hardbacks—are my best friends, having lived with me for years. Yes, I saw the convenience of carrying a digital library around with me in my pocket. Yes, I found it useful to sample unfamiliar or recommended authors by purchasing an inexpensive eBook. But still today, when I find a book that I really treasure, I buy a physical copy. Is that a generational thing, just me? I suspect not, judging by the online book reviewers who generally seem to have a shelf of physical books behind them as they speak.
So, I decided that, this time round, I wanted to offer The Foreign Aide in four versions: as an eBook, a paperback, a hardback—and as an audiobook.
So why have I changed my mind and now decided to publish print versions as well? Because some of my newsletter subscribers have already asked for them. And because I can. A few years ago, it was pretty difficult to publish your own print books—unless you were prepared to risk investing in a batch of 500 or so in the hope that you’d be able to sell them. But today there are a number of excellent Print-On-Demand services, allowing orders for single copies of a book to be printed and shipped to customers in a matter of days and at a price independent authors can afford.
I’ve experimented with two of these suppliers — with Kindle Direct Publishing (belonging to Amazon) and BookVault, a business that prints in the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia. In both cases I wanted to see how a print book would look if I retained the formatting style I’d developed for digital books — and, in my view at least, it works brilliantly, giving the story room to breathe on the page. I’m not sure that editors at a traditional publisher would have let me format a book in this way. It probably adds at least 20 pages to the book, increasing the paper and printing costs. But that’s the beauty of being a self-publisher: I get to set my own rules. And I’m allowed to change my mind.
* * *
The Foreign Aide will be published on June 9th 2026. Sample the first few chapters on the Miles Posts website.