Ten Thousand

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On Saturday evening, some time between 10 pm and 11 pm, I sold my 10,000th e-book. That may not seem much in the grand scheme of things but if you consider the fact that my e-books are essentially put together by my wife and myself in our living room and have been on sale for roughly eight months, you can see why I consider this an achievement. For those of you interested in the actual breakdown of numbers, they were (as of 11:20 pm on the 10th of March): Death’s Angels: 3607 The Serpent Tower: 1845 The Queen’s Assassin: 1625 Shadowblood: Read more…

A Blast From The Past

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So that’s Black Library Live been and gone and  it was a lot of fun. I even managed to pick up a copy of Slaves To Darkness, one of the very first projects I ever worked on at Games Workshop back in the day. It contains the very first encounter of the Emperor and Horus ever written as far as I know (written by me too!), and Adrian Smith’s excellent black and white picture in which I modelled for the Warmaster. I very much enjoyed doing the Warhammer panel with Gav Thorpe, Sarah Cawkwell and Josh Reynolds and it brought a Read more…

Back To The Crusade

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My current 40K novel, The Fist of Demetrius, is starting to shape up. I am about 25000 words in. An ominous cloud of intrigue looms over Macharius as he reaches the absolute zenith of his power at the height of the Crusade. The Dark Eldar are moving across the event horizon. Multiple conflicts loom, with the xenos, with ambitious generals and corrupt Imperial politicians. Macharius ,although he does not know it, is about to experience the pivotal event of his life, a confrontation with something that will turn him from the golden reflection of Alexander the Great into the dark, ruthless fanatic Read more…

Create Your Own Ebook Cover, Step By Step, With Pictures

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Fair warning, you are about to get advice on creating your cover from a man with all the artistic talent of a slug. Indeed, so small are my gifts in this area that several slugs have written in to complain that my statement is demeaning to their creative abilities. It also has to be said you’re going to be taking PowerPoint advice from a man who is not particularly adept with PowerPoint, especially its Windows variant. So why am I doing this exactly? Because I can, of course, and because I want to make a point; that even a man Read more…

High Elves, Dark Elves, All Elves

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Central to the struggle in the Tyrion and Teclis trilogy is the conflict between High Elves and Dark Elves. We all know what that means, don’t we? High Elves are glittering and noble, proud and good. Dark Elves are decadent and wicked, drugged out and crazy, given to torture and malice. They are as different as two peoples can be, aren’t they? Actually, I don’t think so. I think they are exactly the same people. They are just the products of two very different societies. I believe that in every High Elf is a potential Dark Elf, and in every Dark Read more…

The Utility of Free: Some Thoughts on Free EBooks

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I was planning on posting my guide to creating ebook covers in PowerPoint today but these posts are quite labour intensive and yesterday was Valentine’s Day and I decided I would rather go out for a nice dinner with my lovely wife than spend the evening making annotated screenshots. Go figure, huh!  So it’s next week for the PowerPoint guide unless my monkey brain gets distracted by something else… Over at Terribleminds Chuck Wendig has an excellent and thoughtful post about the costs and uses of going free in ebook publication. Go read it, I will still be here when Read more…