Kindle Worlds: A Very Clever Idea
Amazon seems to be on the verge of doing something really clever with its new Kindle Worlds program. It looks as if it has found a genuinely new way of developing, creating and marketing tie-in fiction, and also a method of making fan fiction profitable, not only for Amazon, but for the fans and the creators of the worlds those fans write in. It’s early days yet, of course, and we have not really seen any of the final product but what it appears to be is a system similar to Kindle Direct Publishing which will allow fans to upload their Read more…
And The Winner Is…
I have once again been struck down by Nurgle who has visited upon me yet another of his plagues. Overwhelmed by wheezing, sniffling and feverishness I decided to let the Writing Fantasy Heroes contest run another day. I have risen from my sickbed and with the aid of the D&D random die roller, chosen a winner. All of the entries were excellent and I’d like to thank everybody who took part. And now, without further ado, I fumble with the envelope while the orchestra performs a drum roll, and then I reveal that the winner is Damon Richard. Congratulations, sir!
If You Can Push Save On Your Word-Processor You Can Create An Ebook
Some of you may remember me claiming some time ago that pretty soon you would be able to create an ebook by pushing the save button on your word-processor. Little did I know that it was close to possible even as I was writing that. Of course, it depends on what word-processor you use. It would probably be too much to hope that Microsoft would make creating an ebook possible from within Word any time soon. Apple does allow you to create EPUB documents from Pages but to use that you need a Mac. Scrivener makes it easy to create Read more…
New Kormak Covers
Here are the new covers for the first three books in the Kormak series. I think we can all agree they are a gigantic improvement on the ones I designed myself using Powerpoint and stock art. They were created by Clarissa Yeo at bookcoversale.com. I highly recommend Clarissa if you’re in the market for a cover for your print or ebook. She is fast, talented, patient and very pleasant to work with as well as reasonably priced.
Anatomy of an E-Book Sale
I just bought an e-book, Yesterday’s Spy, by Len Deighton. So what, Bill, I hear you cry– you buy ebooks every day. Most of us do. What’s there worth writing a blog post about in that? Well, it’s a process I usually do unthinkingly and today I actually analysed it on the level of both my intellectual processes and the mechanisms of sale. (Forgive me if what I am going to say sounds entirely obvious, but sometimes it’s worth thinking about the obvious.) Here’s what happened. This morning I was reading an article on Slate about how Len Deighton wrote Read more…
Author’s Notes: Defiler of Tombs
I started work on Defiler of Tombs almost seven years ago, back in 2006. I really wanted to write a novel about Kormak, the monster-hunting hero of The Guardian of the Dawn but I was trying to fit it into the template that would be acceptable to a conventional fantasy publisher. I’ve written about what a struggle that was elsewhere, but to recap, I was trying to fit a lean, taut sword and sorcery tale into an oversized vessel, to make it longer than it was meant to be. It could not to be done (by me at least) and Read more…
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