Sky Pirates Released
I can remember the exact moment when I got the idea for Sky Pirates. I was reading one of Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian books, The Gods Of Mars. I came across his descriptions of the savage green men and, of course, I thought of orcs. For some reason, from then on the idea of Burroughs Green Men and orcs became conjoined in my mind. My brain was filled with the idea of orcish hordes rampaging across the desiccated landscapes of a dying world not unlike Barsoom. Thuvia, Maid of Mars is one of the very first SF novels I can remember Read more…
The E-Book Experiment: 6 Month Report
When I started my e-book experiment I decided I would wait six months before passing any judgements. That would be a long enough period to collect some data and see how the whole thing worked for me. You hear all sorts of contradictory reports about e-publishing but I’ve always liked to collect empirical evidence for myself, rather than listen to who shouts loudest on the internet. I decided I was just going to release the backlist I had and work on projects that interested me in the gaps between my work for Black Library. Well, six months have passed so Read more…
The Inquiry Agent Released
I always wanted to write a tough-guy, first person detective story in the style of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammet but it’s a very American form and I never felt confident that I could carry off the setting. Somehow Scotland never seemed quite to fit my vision as a setting for this sort of story. Other people, such as Ian Rankine, have managed it but I never could make it work for me; too close to home for the way I write, I suppose. It was one of those ideas I put on the back-burner while I went my merry 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…
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…
Ebook News
On Saturday, I sold the one thousandth ebook of Death’s Angels. It was a nice milestone to pass. It comes in the first month in which I have sold over a thousand ebooks too. All in all I have sold a couple of thousand books in the Terrarch series and roughly 2400 ebooks in total including short stories and collections. I have also had roughly five thousand downloads of the Guardian of the Dawn since it went free. I started selling ebooks in July and have released one of the Terrarch books roughly every six weeks since then. The last Read more…
^