kindle

“The Weight of Reason” now available on KDP

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weight of reason 2

Yes, at long last I have bitten the bullet, given it one final edit for typos and to tweak the text and finally listed it for sale on Amazon.

You can now buy The Weight of Reason on your local Amazon website. Unfortunately, it is available only on Kindle at the moment due to the exclusivity terms and conditions of being in the Kindle Select programme. This gives extra benefits such as royalties from the lending programme, promotion on the Kindle store and higher royalty rates from Amazon Brazil and Amazon India. Continue reading →

I think I have my cover

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So I’ve spent the weekend fiddling around with some more potential covers and I think I’ve found my secondary font… Agency FB (for author name and subtitle “a novelette”).

Here’s a selection of covers I’ve been playing around with. I like the dusky orange colour, I think it fits quite well but just for curiosity I produced a similar one in a terracotta as well as yellow (though part of me still wants to go for a silvery white). I’m not so keen on the yellow and much prefer the other two. I also think the title is a little obtrusive at the larger size. I will definitely choose a variation of one of these covers now so any last minute advice would be appreciated. Continue reading →

The Urge to Blurb

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Enjoying the sunshine yesterday afternoon (one of the perks of being self-employed), I thought about what the advertising blurb would be for The Weight of Reason. Blurb, for those of you who do not know, is the short description that goes on the back of a book explaining what it is about. It is also the description that goes on the Amazon website. Typically around one hundred words, it is the point at which a reader will decide to buy or not to buy. We may not judge a book by its cover, but we do judge it by its blurb. Continue reading →

ebook update Dec 2012

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I’m pretty sure I’m not going to make a year-end release now. As you may remember, I now have a second job as a copywriter and this takes up several evenings per week. Squeezing in writing for pleasure is going to be difficult over the next couple of weeks at least. Though all of my short stories have now been edited (and I still want to do a final grammar and typo check on all of them), the final piece in the collection will be the concluding part to the Herrenvolk saga. After bouncing a few ideas around last night, I finally have some ideas I want to try out but with another busy week ahead – workwise and a long weekend away next weekend – I can’t see I’ll have much time to work on them. Here’s to starting at least something before Christmas though. Continue reading →

Nook to enter UK market

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US book seller Barnes & Noble are entering their rival Nook device into the UK market and it will be sold exclusively through chain store John Lewis Partnership. There isn’t much competition here at the moment in the ebook reader market. Amazon has the majority share and the Kobo, which sells exclusively through WHSmith, has not fared as well in the UK as it has done in North America. The Guardian suggests that Amazon Kindle sales represents a wapping 90% of the market share. Continue reading →

Where is Arc 1.3?

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By my reckoning it is late.

Arc 1.1 was released on 15th Feb 2012.
Arc 1.2 was released on 24th May 2012.

It is a quarterly magazine so surely Arc 1.3 should be out by now? I have received no communication on this, there is nothing on the Arcfinity tumblr and I’ve not received a single update about upcoming content. The competition link is still on the tumblr page and that closed sometime in July.

There is also nothing on The Tomorrow Project website.

Anybody know anything?

Amazon say Kindle sales outstripping those of physical books

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They said it was coming but now, online retail giant Amazon have claimed that Kindle ebook sales have overtaken those of printed books. Combining all hardback and paperback sales, digital downloads for Kindle devices is winning the war. But is it? Is there more to this story than meets the eye?

I’d like to go all “2012 and all that” on this post (my secondary blog where I challenge publicly believed nonsense and misinformation) and try to explain my understanding of how this is panning out in real terms. My alarm bells started to ring when I read this excerpt:

Much to the consternation of the publishing industry, Amazon has refused to release audited figures for its digital book sales, something it does for printed books. It told The Guardian that the company would not discuss future policy on the matter.

Continue reading →

Amazon.co.uk steampunk offer

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Just a quick heads-up people. amazon.co.uk yesterday started a Kindle Reading Marathon with the best part of 600 books on sale from 99p upwards. Despite this large selection, there are only four in the science fiction genre.

I bought two of them for the grand total of £1.98. Nothing else in the collection interested me though if I hadn’t already read it, I’d have bought Rivers of London for £1.99

These were The Mammoth Book of Steampunk and The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards.

I’m still eager to explore steampunk a little more. I’m still very much the beginner and I’ve come to the subgenre through the artwork… someday I will discuss some of my favourite examples even though it is off-topic for this blog.