Writing Blood of Aenarion (Part One)

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Sometimes a book goes exactly the way you always thought such things would back when you were a kid dreaming about being a writer. You get to visit glamorous, exotic locations, eat great food, lounge around in your pyjamas (or your swimsuit) and do exactly what you would do back home, only patting yourself on the back about how lucky you are and how excellent your choice of career was. Writing Blood of Aenarion was like that for me. I got an email from my agent about writing the Tyrion and Teclis trilogy late in 2009. It was an exciting Read more…

Death’s Angels Finally Free In The UK

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As of Tuesday evening Death’s Angels, my dark fantasy tale of mercenary soldiers in a world haunted by ancient demon gods, is free on Amazon UK as well as iTunes UK. That means you can now download the book for free most anywhere I can manage it, should you feel so inclined. Why have I done this? Glad you asked. It all started with my post about the general disappointment in the indie community caused by Amazon’s tinkering with its algorithms for free promotions using the Select program. The net result of this has been that books no longer get the Read more…

Death’s Angels Free

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Just wanted to make a quick announcement that Death’s Angels, the first book in the Terrarch series will be available free for a limited time on Amazon.com, B&N and iTunes US and UK. For some reason, it refuses to go free on Amazon.co.uk but you can download it from Smashwords. Alternatively, if you get really desperate, you can email me with your reader type and I will send you a copy in a format suitable for your machine. 

Year One

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Exactly one year ago today I started writing this blog. Not many people noticed because I did not allow it to be picked up by the search engines for some time after that. I had tried maintaining a blog on several occasions in the past and always given up after a few posts. I wanted to see if I could produce posts on a regular schedule before risking public failure again. I wrote a few, decided it was not too difficult and pushed on. The very first post I wrote was a very short response to seeing Game of Thrones. I Read more…

Ubuntu 12.04 First Impressions

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Long term followers of this blog will know that I use multiple computers and multiple operating systems when I work. Of late, I have mostly been using my new MacBook Air, singularly the most lovely piece of hardware I have ever owned, and Scrivener 2 which remains the most polished iteration of that great piece of novel writing software. Over the past few months, I’ve mostly used my Windows PCs for gaming and I have been  neglecting my Linux installations completely. All of this changed this week when I finally got round to installing the latest release of Ubuntu, 12.04 Precise Pangolin, Read more…

The Disappointment With Free

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Around last Christmas Amazon brought in its Select program which among other things allowed independent e-publishers to make their books free for 5 days in a 90 day period. The results of going free were, in some cases, astonishing. I should know— it worked for me. I made my book The Inquiry Agent free for five days during the holiday period and when it came off the promotion it jumped into the top ten bestseller lists for its category, and hit 70 plus sales a day for a while. This was in historical mysteries, a genre in which I have Read more…