Charting the Amazon

It's now three weeks since "Kidnapped" was launched, and in between nipping off to spend time with the US Marines in Afghanistan, I have been doing various publicity interviews for the book. It is a varied bag, taking me to the Holy Grail of travel writing, Radio Four's "Excess Baggage" with Sandi Toksvig, via local papers such as the Southwark News, and also slightly more off-track outlets such as Sabado (a Portuguese language news magazine). What the effect of these various efforts is on sales, however, is very hard to tell. The only real indicator is the book's ranking on Amazon, which has a real-time sales ranking for every book in its stock worldwide. As I write, "Kidnapped" is currently at number 10,506. Which doesn't great, I admit, until you compare it with how other books are doing, for example tomes like the Geological Society's gripping read, "Deformation Mechanisms, Rheology and Tectonics", which is currently at number 4,787,712. 
Broadly speaking, as far as I can work out, any book that has a ranking of four figures or less is doing okay, although they do seem to fluctuate rather wildly: Kidnapped, for example, has gone as high as 5,000 and as low as about 50,000 within a couple of days. The way it works, according to this article here, is that each book gets a vote whenever a copy is purchased, and is re-ranked every hour. It isn't an absolute measure of sales quantity, but a measure of how a book is doing relative to others, so books that aren't selling will gradually shift down the ranks. Which means, though, as far as I can tell, that if half a dozen copies are sold within one particular hour, it may rocket up quite a bit, while if there is a fallow period, it will plummet towards six figures again, despite this not being much of a real indicator of how it's doing overall. The upshot of all this being, however, that one gets completely hooked on checking Amazon all the time (I have already looked about three times today, and will probably check again before bed). It's more addictive than email.

Hotel mini-bars I have known

It's not unusual to hear people who travel a lot complain about the amount of time they have to spend in hotels. Personally, I've never really had much sympathy for them, especially when they're whinging about spending the night at yet another "soulless" Intercontinental, Hilton, or Four Seasons. True, modern business hotels may all look and feel rather similar inside, but if that's your only complaint, then you've clearly never spent much time in the likes of the $4-a-night Al Majalis in Baghdad, where I spent three months in 2003, despite the absence of air conditioning in the 50C summer heat.

Yet even so, I enjoyed living there, and to this day, I still personally get a strange thrill out of staying in hotel rooms. It's partly the way you never know what you'll get until you walk in. Will it be a presidential-sized three-bed suite, or will it be a broom cupboard? And, most importantly, will it have a mini bar?

Childish though it may seem, having one's own private supply of drinks, crisps and sweets still feels to me to be the height of luxury, and checking out the contents of the mini-bar is one of the first things I do. Once again, there is the glorious element of surprise, although over the years, I have gradually worked out that there are four or five global mini-bar "profiles".

The "Standard" mini-bar (Hilton/Four Seasons/Holiday Inn etc)
Pringles, peanuts, two bottles of Heineken, Snicker bar, soft drinks. Plus maybe a few miniatures and a half-bottle of wine. Enough alcohol - and, at a push, nutrition - to sustain the average foreign correspondent for a couple of days if necessary.

The "Halal" mini-bar. (Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya etc)
Not really a "bar" at all really, given that the "beer", on closer inspection, always turns out to be non-alcoholic. The only exception is Pakistan, where at the Marriot in Karachi, it used to be possible to get beer and whisky on room service long as you filled in a form in triplicate confirming that you were a) a foreigner b) requiring it for "medicinal purposes" only. Quite what medicinal purpose was served by own self-prescription  - three bottles of beer and two large glasses of whisky - I am not sure, although I did need some aspirin the next day.

The "Empty" mini-bar (anywhere)
A terrible disappointment, containing only a bottle of water. Or, if you're really unlucky, just a bad smell.

The "Tripwire" mini-bar (The Marriott in Cardiff Docks, if I remember rightly)
Well-stocked, but bearing a bizarre warning that every item inside was on a pressure pad, and that removing them would automatically incur a fee, even if you then put them back. The idea, apparently, was to stop crafty guests taking items out and replacing them with (far cheaper) stuff bought from the local corner shop. True, when all that is at stake is the odd can of beer, quite why they needed the sort of security system that only an experienced jewel thief could get around was a mystery to me. One clue, perhaps, was that next to the mini-bar lay a complimentary copy of The Spirit to Serve, the biograpy of John Willard Marriott Jnr, whose Mormon father built the empire up from humble beginnings with a root beer stand. Supplied in every room along with the Gideon Bible, it's a typically American inspirational how-I-got-to-the top book, of how Pa Marriott brought his son up tough-but-fair, taught him the values that makes the Marriott chain what it is today, etc. Or something like that. To be honest, I didn't read more than the first few pages. But it seems that one key lesson might be: give your life story away free, but never anything from the mini-bar.

The Slavic mini-bar. (Russia, Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Poland etc)
My personal favourite. Aside from the Brits, the Slavic nations are one of the few who take their boozing and binge-drinking seriously. Not only will there be beer and wine, and a generous range of miniatures, the Russians sometimes throw in champagne too, and even the odd half-litre bottle of vodka. Plus, of course, it's often dirt cheap. You can throw an entire room party on less money than it costs to activate just one of the pressure pads in a Marriott gaff. Cheers!

Mistaken for Mladic?

Currently in Serbia, where Ratko Mladic, the last of the great war crimes suspects, was arrested on Wednesday. We've been up to the village where he was found, which is home to several families of his cousins, and is classic Serb redneck territory: lots of big, beefy blokes, and the occasional bit of hostility to the visiting "Western" press, whom they still accuse - rightly, to an extent - of being biased against them during the Balkans wars. 
Still, after all those years standing out like a billiard ball in Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere, I find a certain relief in working in a place where I at least look like the people who are being unfriendly to me. Round the Balkans, being a stocky, slightly ruddy-faced white man with a receding hairline is a way of blending in, not standing out. Having said that, I am less than overjoyed when one of the locals wanders up and makes the following friendly remark. "I thought you were a villager," he says. "There's a family around here who all look just like you."

A poor sense of entitlement

This week I will finally take delivery of the first printed copies of my new book, Kidnapped: life as a Somali pirate hostage. Or should it have been Hostage Hell: Life as a captive on Somalia’s pirate coast? Or Warlords on the waves: how anarchy in Somalia spread from land to sea? Or how about Somalia: buccaneers of the 21st century?

Choosing the right title for a book isn't easy. All that time and effort sweating out 100,000 words or so on the pages themselves, and then all of a sudden you have to sum it all up in one single morsel. It's bad enough trying to do that ot in a single-side-of-A-4 publisher's proposal, or a few pars of blurb on the back, never mind a single, Tweet-length sentence. It's rather like those infernal competitions to think up a slogan on the back of a cereal packet: it must tell you what the product is, and why you might want to buy it, but all in a pithy, not-more-than 20, words manner.

The new book has been quite hard to get the title right on, mainly because it is, in a sense, not one story, but three. The first is that of my kidnapping in Somalia, the second is that of the piracy problem, and the third is the story of Somalia itself, and why it came to such a pass that people like pirates could thrive in the first place. In other words, it's partly a first person this-happened-to-me book, and partly a factual historical account, aimed at people who might have read about pirates in the news, and who want to learn a bit more about Somalia (but not in a heavy-going academic sort of way). Getting that all into a title is quite hard though, as the various options I came up with over time prove:

Lawless Land, Troubled Seas: Life as a hostage on Somalia’s pirate coast
This was my personal favourite, although it doesn't really make it obvious that the book is about anything other than the kidnap. Plus, my publisher at Monday Books, Dan Collins, felt we needed something more "direct". Which, in retrospect, may have been a rather politer version of what my other half, Jane, had to say about this title. Namely, that it was "poncey and overblown, a bit ridiculous, really."

Hostage Hell: Life as a captive on Somalia’s pirate coast
Punchy yes, but reads like a News of the World headline. You could imagine it squatting among the Len Deightons on the bookshelf at the airport, but not very sensitive to my aspirations to a literary/travelogue feel.

The Pirates of Puntland
A good generic headline, but once again, it doesn't mention my own personal experience, and in any event, has already been snaffled by another author. Plus, in an era of Amazon.com, "Puntland" isn't really a very Googlable term. It needs Somalia, hostage, and pirate in, ideally.

The Ladder Salesmen of Somalia
This is what I call a "cryptic" title, which are quite common in travel-type books. It's almost the opposite of the tabloid technique above. You pick something deliberately oblique and unexplained, in the hope that it will compel an intrigued reader into purchasing to satisfy their curiosity. Hence books like Salmon Fishing in the Yemen or The Sewing Circles of Herat, and, indeed, my own previous effort about Iraq, "The Curse of the Al Dulaimi Hotel".

"The Ladder Salesmen" is a reference to the fact that Somali pirates always carry grappling ladders when out on the hunt at sea, which they use to board boats during hijacks. When the anti-piracy task force does stop-and-search ops on suspected pirate skiffs, it's an obvious give-away. The story goes, though, that one occasion, a group of pirates who were stopped with a ladder claimed they were simply passing "ladder salesmen". When subsequently asked to explain why they only had one "for sale", they claimed to be running "low on stock". I thought this was rather a nice little detail, but then reluctantly came to the conclusion that it would have been far too obscure for a title. For a start, it would have taken half the blurb on the back of the book to explain it. Plus, there is the Google-search factor again: the only people who would find it, presumably, would be those browsing for ladders and/or general DIY equipment in Somalia. Which is a bit of a niche market, even by the standards of the internet. Back to the drawing board...

The Ballad of Pirate Yusuf's Cave: tales from Somalia's broken land and sea

Again, a cryptic title. Yusuf was the leader of the gang that held us, and we lived in a cave. Rather a nice literary twang, I thought. Or maybe not. "Even poncier", said Jane. And inaccurate, added my friend Neil. "Unless you spend part of your time in the cave as a bawdy singer, you can't have a ballad." Cringe city again.

Somalia: Failed State
My Dad's suggestion. He was pretty insistent about this, until I politely pointed out to him that the title "Failed State" has already been used in books on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, and numerous other countries. Even the USA, if you count "Failed States" by Noam Chomsky.

I could go on for much longer with these, but here are the best of the rest, if you can call them that, which degenerate into the faintly ridiculous.

Forty Days and Forty Nights: Had a vaguely Ali Baba-ish feel to it, I thought.

Then there was a few stabs at alliteration. Warlords on the waves. And Criminal Coast. Or Kalashnikov Coast. Hmmm...

Alternatively, there was the retro option, to go for one of those Victorian style "Explorer's Adventures-on-Dark-Continent of Africa" titles. I quote a bit from one such tome in the book, The Narrative of the Sufferings and Adventures of Henderick Portenger, written by some poor chap who got shipwrecked on the Somali coast in 1801, and who had an extremely thin time at the hands of the locals. The "retro-Victorian" technique worked well for Kate Summerscale, who won the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize a couple of years ago for: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House, a recreation of a real-life murder mystery at a country house in the 19th century.

However, my equivalent, I guess, would be something like: "The Narrative of the Sufferings of Colin Freeman: his ordeal at the hands of the wicked savages of Somalia."

Which, far from winning the Samuel Johnson prize, would probably get me banned from entering.  So Kidnapped: life as a Somali pirate hostage it is.

No more heroes any more...

Latest word on OBL fall-out is that Bin Laden's secret pad in Pakistan is to be demolished to stop it becoming a shrine to the al-Qaeda leader. The local officials are pretty convinced that it will indeed draw in the crowds, although I can't really see it myself. It might get the odd rubbernecking foreign reporter like me, but tourists to Pakistan aren't exactly thick on the ground at the moment, and the average Al Qaeda sympathiser in Pakistan is unlikely to want to draw himself to the attention of the ISI by turning up and laying a wreath. I'm sure the ISI will be watching too, if my own experience of working in Pakistan is anything to go by. I was apprehended by one of their agents on a trip to Pakistan in 2008 - not during an exclusive interview with Mullah Omar, I regret to say, but during the rather more innocent business of shadowing some British embassy officials who were trying to rescue a woman from a forced marriage . As I recall, at the time all we'd done was pull over in a village to make a few phone calls en route to where we were going; the mere sight of a few passing strangers, though, was enough to make the local ISI man materialise and ask the diplomats what they were up to. All seeing, indeed...
Besides which, the track record of recent bogeymen in the "War on Terror" for becoming bigger in death than they were in life isn't that impressive. Saddam Hussein, for example, has an elegantly turned-out mausoleum near his home town of Tikrit, where he is buried alongside a fairly full hand of the old "Deck of 55" most wanted, including his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti, who was the Five of Clubs, Taha Yasi Ramadan, the Iraqi vice-president who was the Ten of Diamonds, and Saddam's psychotic sons Uday and Qusay. Yet visitor numbers are seldom more than a trickle, as the Telegraph discovered when we sent our old Iraqi stringer, Akeel, to pay a visit on the anniversary of Saddam's death. Rather touchingly, though, some folks round there did still call him "The President", and apparently claimed that his face now appeared as that of the Old Man in the Moon. No such affection for Abu Musab al Zarqawi, however, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose body was apparently buried at a secret location in the Iraqi desert after the US killed him with a rocket strike. I am unaware of any kind of shrine to him anywhere, including in his home town of Zarqa in Jordan, nor has his name particularly lived on in death. Bin Laden, I guess, will be different, although it just how much continues to inspire from beyond the grave, only time will tell...

Was up till midnight last night trying to set this thing up. Jane, my other half, has given me the following encouragement.
"What's the idea of it?" she says.
"It's so that people can get the benefit of my wisdom and experience on all matters foreign."
"Why would anyone want to read that?"

ISI with my little eye

Finally got round to setting up this blog just five or six years after blogging supposedly became the cutting edge of modern journalism. The idea, in theory, is to enlighten the blogosphere with regular insights about places like Iraq, Iran, Somalia and Yemen, and other places that The Sunday Telegraph has kindly paid me to go to over the years. In practice, it will probably be something rather more self-indulgent, on pretty much anything that catches my attention.

So what about this week? Only one story in the news really, which is the capture of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Much speculation, of course, that Pakistan's all-seeing Inter-Services-Intelligence agency - or ISI - may have been hiding him, fuelled in part by the fact that he was staying in a garrison town that was home to the cream of Pakistani military. I do, however, have my own conspiracy theory on this, which is that OBL may have actually been hiding with no outside help at all - save, that is, for the few people who were actually sheltering him in the house. After all, if one wants to keep one's whereabouts secret, is the best way not to keep the circle of people in the know as small as possible?  Had various senior figures in the Pakistani government known he was there, I can't help thinking that one or other of them would have shopped him long ago to the Americans, either to claim a reward or to buy Islamabad out of some diplomatic spat with Washington, of which there have been no shortage over recent years. Bin Laden, I would argue, might well have feared this himself, and chosen as a result to cut himself from as many Pakistani government "handlers" as he could, rather than cosying himself ever more into their bosom. As long as he remained indoors in that high-walled compound, and had a few trusted fixers running his errands, I'm not really sure why he'd need lots of senior ISI men looking out for him as well.

There is also a precedent for this, in terms of high-profile fugitives. When Radovan Karadzic, the indicted Serb leader, went on the run, it was always assumed he was hiding with the connivance of Serbian intelligence, yet when he was finally found in 2008, he was living alone as a New Age guru in Belgrade. It was a great disguise, but the most effective part of it all was that he didn't need anybody else to help with it - the beard, the ponytail and the hippy lifestyle meant nobody ever thought he was anything other than a harmless crank. In other words, when it came to looking after himself whle on the run, he eventually turned to the one person he knew he could completely trust - himself.