Interrogated By Skaven
I was recently captured and interrogated by Skaven. The full horrific results can be found here.
The Future As Boiled Frog
I am sitting in a cafe in Prague typing this in Open Office Writer on an Asus eeePC netbook running Ubuntu 10.10. I was thinking about working on my old Amstrad CPC 6128 in Edinburgh back in 1986 and the fact that the future has come like that famous frog, the one that doesn’t notice it is being boiled alive because the water around it is being heated so slowly. It’s small changes here, small changes there and then without ever really realising it, you are living in a science fiction world. I think of this netbook as being an Read more…
The Cost of Kindle Select
I checked my balance on Smashwords this morning, as I do intermittently—Smashwords does not have anything like the real-time reporting of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing so it is not nearly so addictive. I am not sure I completely understand Smashwords arcane system of accounting but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I am owed roughly $150. That’s not a great deal for a 5 month reporting period but it’s all extra money, most of it earned in the past three months. That got me thinking about Amazon’s Kindle Select program and its exclusivity clause, the one that says you Read more…
Manic Monday
Blood of Aenarion, my first new Warhammer novel in more than eight years, has just been released. I had planned a long post for today about the writing of the book, which was something of an epic in itself, involving travel across Europe and Asia, visits to exotic and glamourous locations and my discovery of a shrine to Slaanesh in that most likely of places, Thailand. I kept a diary of the trip and the process of writing and took photos to document my journey. Unfortunately, in one of those clear demonstrations of the law of unintended consequences, I upgraded Read more…
The Small, Nagging Voice
Yesterday I finished the first draft of my Kormak novel, Mask of the Necromancer. I did it ahead of schedule, just carried along by the flow of the writing. You’d think I’d be happy, but no, being a writer and a neurotic, I’ve found a way to make myself unhappy about this. Since I believe in spreading the misery, I thought I would share my method with you. This week I made a commitment to write 3000 words a day, 50% more than I normally would. Mostly this was a result of reading Rachel Aaron’s 10K a day article and Read more…
E-Books: The Content Wars Begin
When I signed into my KDP account today there was a new banner right beside the logo announcing KDP Select and showing a link to the details of the new program. (For those of you who do not know the acronym, it stands for Kindle Direct Publishing and it’s the arm of Amazon that lets me distribute those ebooks you see in the right hand column of this blog.) The basic information is interesting. In return for going exclusive with Amazon for 90 days you get access to some bonus features. You can make your book free for 5 days Read more…
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