Indie Publishing a Print Book

So, how much does it cost to independently produce the print version of a book these days? Well, Stealer of Flesh (currently available from Amazon, the Book Depository and any bookstore where you care to place an order ISBN: 978-1483969541) cost me somewhere under $125. To those of you who, like me, grew up in the world of Quark Xpress, offset printing and warehouse distribution, that number is probably jaw-dropping. Welcome to the new world of Print On Demand (POD) publishing. Let’s take a look out how the figures break down. I used CreateSpace, Amazon’s print on demand subsidiary for the Read more…

Father’s Day on the Assassin’s Road

Quite by coincidence I celebrated Father’s Day by reading the new Dark Horse Lone Wolf and Cub Omnibus. This concerns the adventures of a man even less likely to win the Father of the Year Award than Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones. Ogami Itto travels Tokugawa Shogunate Japan pursuing his career as an unstoppable assassin. A man capable of slaughtering squads of highly trained ninja, scores of bandits and small armies of Ronin with his trusty dotanuki battle-blade, what makes his feats of butchery even more impressive is that he often performs them while pushing the pram containing his Read more…

The Man Who Came to Blog – Vincent W. Rospond

I first met Vince Rospond in Nottingham many, many moons ago. He was then North American Sales Manager for Black Library. This, the fact that he was a very affable chap and that he was from New Jersey were the things that stuck in my mind during that first meeting. We went out for dinner with some friends. At the time I had been watching a lot of the Sopranos, and they were on my mind. As you know the mob family also hails from New Jersey and something misfired within my brain. During the course of the evening I kept Read more…

The Inquiry Agent Free on Amazon

I thought I had better mention the fact that my Victorian detective novel The Inquiry Agent is free on Amazon today. I have cancelled the automatic renewal on Kindle Select and I won’t be renewing it in the foreseeable future so this may well be your last chance to pick the book up as a freebie. The Inquiry Agent is not very typical of my usual style or genre but it is, in many ways, the best book I have written and it’s one I am very proud of. If you need any more encouragement, here is the blurb. London Read more…

Floodland

Radka put up some more very impressive pictures of the recent Prague floods here. Go take a look. I think they explain the semi-Apocalyptic tone of my last post rather well. The rain has stopped now and I have temporarily suspended building the ark on our roof. I think the State of Emergency is over, in the city at least. The Metro is still not working, lots of parks are still closed off. I feel a strange urge to go and listen to the Sisters of Mercy now. And why not? It’s been a while since I heard This Corrosion. 

A Cosy Catastrophe

It’s been raining a lot here in Prague recently, to the point where I have been making my usual dumb joke about how if I had wanted weather like this I would have stayed in Scotland. The rain has gone on for well over a week now, sometimes a light drizzle, often a monsoonal downpour, pretty much always there. You can hear the quiet roar of it in the courtyard of our building at night. It’s like being caught beneath a very small waterfall. Whenever you go out for a walk there is always a faint hissing noise in the Read more…