John Locke, Market Research and E-Book Pricing
I am a pretty hardcore reader. There probably has not been a week in the past 40 years when I have not bought a book. Many weeks I have bought far more. I think the most I have ever bought in one day was 45 but those were truly exceptional circumstances. At conventions I can easily buy 10-20 in a day. When I was a kid if I did not have enough pocket money to buy a book, I would spend my dinner money on them instead. When I was a student and a heavy smoker it once came down Read more…
Trollope On Writing
A few weeks back I alluded to a quote from Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography about three hours writing per day being all that was needed from an author. Being as methodical as I am lazy I have eventually dug up the actual text. “All those I think who have lived as literary men,–working daily as literary labourers,–will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours,–so have tutored his mind that it Read more…
The Best Laid Plans
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley. I expected to be on a train to Berlin Hauptbahnhof, family in tow, right about now; this to be swiftly followed by four days of swanning around the capital of Germany, visiting museums, eating in nice restaurants, seeing friends and doing all the usual tourist stuff. Instead I am staring at the screen of the monitor in my office in the (admittedly delightful) city of Prague musing on the vagaries of life. How did it come down to this? Yesterday, Nurgle struck down my son Dan with some sort of Read more…
Well Done Amazon, Kindle on Linux Finally
A lot of people have been praising Amazon’s new Cloud Reader, an extension for Chrome and Safari which allows you to do pretty much everything you do on a Kindle or Amazon’s iPad app but using only your browser. They have (quite correctly IMHO) assumed that this was an attempt to evade paying the 30% fee Apple demands for in-App purchases on the iPad and iPhone by letting users read their Kindle books in their browsers and make purchases from there too. I don’t own an iPad so I can’t personally attest to how well it works on Apple’s magical Read more…
Cyberpunk Stories
Cyberpunk is what the future used to look like — at least to me. It was the big SF movement of my long gone youth and preparing these old stories (written almost a quarter of a century ago) for e-pub I recaptured some of the excitement I felt about it then. Cyberpunk was exciting for me. It was hip, it was hot, it was new, it was shiny. It reflected the realities of the strange dark age of the 1980s as I understood them. This was a world where economics was everything, where corporations ruled, where governments were the servants 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…
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