Building a Hive

What does the future smell like?

I spend a significant chunk of my working life thinking about this. To write fiction set in the 40K universe (or any other) you need to know how things look, sound, feel and smell. You need to convince your readers of the reality of the world your characters are moving through. You need to stimulate their imaginations with small, telling details that help them to believe in the place. You need to be able to describe how things feel, how they smell, how they sound if you are going to conjure up vivid images in their minds.

Games Workshop’s artists and sculptors have given us a very good idea of what the 41st Millennium looks like, but for the rest of it, you have some work to do.

Right now I am writing a story set in the Hive city of Irongrad; a vast, multi-layered urban mountain with the population of a modern country. I need, at least in my imagination, to walk its streets, and come back with a description that convinces. It’s a form of intellectual time and space travel. Once that’s done I need to be able to relate what I find to physical stimuli that readers can grasp.

How do I do that? Read more…

A New Hope

So the great e-book experiment thunders on and my sales have risen to an average of 3 a day. The sunlit uplands of selling 1000 books a year sweep into view. This makes me very hopeful and not just about the prospect of my rent getting paid. It makes me hopeful for publishing and genres I love and for lots of new and experimental writing in general.

I know — you’ve heard that self-published e-books are the death knell of good writing. Without the gatekeepers of mainstream publishing aren’t all lovers of literature doomed? How can I be hopeful as the mongol tide of sub-literate, self-pubbed scum rapes and pillages its way across the pristine landscapes of mainstream publishing and sets fire to the ivory towers of excellence?

Glad you asked. As part of that mongol tide I would like to thank you for the opportunity of giving you my answer. Read more…

So Here We Are In E-Book Land

It’s been an interesting weekend. Like every other proud publisher of a Kindle book I have done more than my share of checking my sales figures. I am pleased to report that I have sold an average of two books a day since Friday. Pleased, I hear you cry? Two books a day does not sound like a lot, Bill. Particularly not for a bestselling Warhammer writer like yourself. It’s not a huge amount, true. But if you consider my publicity and marketing has consisted of an email to 4 of my test readers thanking them for their help and Read more…

Death’s Angels on Smashwords

In a fit of unusual industriousness for me, I have uploaded Death’s Angels to Smashwords which means that hopefully, at some point in the next few weeks, it will become available on the iPad, iPhone and Barnes and Noble Nook as well as the Sony eReader. All this being subject to the approval of the good people at Smashwords. And by the way, a big thank you to whoever it was who bought Death’s Angels on Amazon.co.uk today. I still have not got notice from Amazon that the book is officially live! Whoever you were you are my first e-book Read more…

Death’s Angels

Today I uploaded Death’s Angels to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing system. It is still going through the approval process as I write this but I have to say I am thrilled. It’s been a long strange journey to see this book come out in English. It’s taken almost six years. The book has already been published in German, Spanish, Polish and Czech but never found an English language publisher. In the end I have released the book myself with, it has to be said, considerable help from others. So I would just like to take this opportunity to thank Angela Read more…

WINE

For those of you not familiar with it, WINE is a compatibility layer that sits between the software and the operating system and lets you run Windows programs in Linux without actually having a copy of Windows. The results have been very impressive. So far I have the Windows versions of Evernote 4.4 and Microsoft Word 2007 running. I used the Playonlinux front-end for WINE to instal Word without a hitch. (There is no option for Evernote on this software so I did a manual install.) There have been one or two graphical blemishes occasionally but both programs run well enough Read more…