For no good reason I’m making Coffin Dodgers free for the next 24 hours. The UK version is here, and the US version is here.
If you get it and like it, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a review on Amazon. You don’t have to, but if you don’t, then when I die I’m going to come back and haunt you.Икони на светци
Here’s a fun wee diversion: a writing analyser that takes your text and tells you which famous writer you write like. I got Douglas Adams, although it seems that if you put in any kind of tech journalism whatsoever it tells you you write like Cory Doctorow.
Simon Royle’s IndieView is a real friend to indie authors, and I’m happy to help with a tribute he’s organising in memory of Linda “LC” Evans. For one day only on 24th January, anybody who buys one of Evans’ ebooks can get another one free from a big selection of ebooks, including mine.
The deal’s simple enough: buy one of LC Evans’ books, choose your freebie and email the order receipt (take your credit card details out if they’re listed; you never know what cash-strapped authors are capable of) to the appropriate author. And, er, that’s it.
The list of free books is here, and while it’s still being updated you’ll see there’s already a really wide selection.
To celebrate and honor our friend, indie author, L.C. Evans, and her contribution to the Indie eBook revolution, we’re giving away a whole bunch of free books. Linda lost her fight with cancer earlier this month. We lost a friend and a compatriot. We’d like you to buy her books, read her books, and make her words live.
…If chick lit or romantic comedy is not your thing, authors who have been interviewed on the IndieView will give you one of their books for every one of Linda’s books that you buy. For every receipt you send through, you will also get a lucky draw entry. The winners of the lucky draw will get a bundle of ALL the books – free.
I found Coffin Dodgers on a couple of pirate sites yesterday, and it really annoyed me. Assuming it’s actually there – there’s no guarantee that just because a free download site says it’s got a book that it actually has the book – it means I’ve fallen victim to the wrong kind of copying.
There are two kinds of copying. There’s good copying, and there’s bad copying.
(This is a long post, so I’ve split it so it doesn’t overpower the entire home page)
I like Michael Marshall, and his blog post about the other side of the piracy debate is worth your time. Not all anti-piracy sentiment comes from swivel-eyed loons or Disney.
The government is supposed to be on the side of laws, isn’t it? Copyright is a law too. If they don’t defend that law in the new kind of social space that the internet represents, where will the laxity end? What other laws will be let slide on the grounds that they might impede the rights of Internet users to do what the heck they feel like? What about your right to privacy? You care a lot about that one, don’t you? What makes it so desperately important for the government to defend your rights there, but not defend others’ rights to be paid for their intellectual property?
An interesting post on the appallingly named tech site Pandodaily: Confessions of a publisher, written by an unnamed “industry insider”.
Amazon could probably afford to lose $20 million/year in their publishing arm just to put the other publishers out of business. I think that’s what they’re trying to do–throw money around in an industry that doesn’t have any, until Amazon becomes not only the only place where you buy books, but the only place that publishes books, too.
As of right now, Coffin Dodgers is number one in Amazon UK’s technothrillers chart. That’s quite good, isn’t it?
Sales are currently sitting at 2,323. That’s quite good too.
This is making up for a spectacularly crappy day.
Today’s the big protest against SOPA, the latest bit of dangerous anti-internet legislation. I’ve written a wee column suggesting that it won’t change much in the long term, because lobbyists are fighting a long war:
Copyright industries want the net regulated, and they’re willing to spend huge sums to make it happen: SOPA is a battle, but the lobbyists are waging a war.
You don’t fight that by turning sites black. You fight it by supporting the EFF, and the ACLU, and the ORG, and by lobbying your elected representatives, and you fight it it in the ballot box. In the last general election just 55% of 25-34 year olds voted, while turnout for the 18-24 age group was a pathetic 44%.
We need to do better, because the best way to fight bad laws is to stop clowns from getting into power in the first place.
According to somebody on Twitter, that’s akin to telling women of the 1960s to shut up and know their place. I’m a bit baffled by that.
Some interesting figures in this Guardian piece about new novelists:
Kate Pool of the Society of Authors confirmed that new writers could expect an average advance of £10,000 around 20 years ago: “Now they’re lucky to get between £1,000 and £3,000.” Research by the society shows that 75% of writers earn less than £20,000 a year and 46% less than £5,000.
As Ian Rankin says:
“The internet has pluses and minuses. It’s easier than ever to get your stuff seen by people. But it’s harder than ever to make a living from it. Look at the money that publishers are paying for new writers … less than they paid 20 years ago. They know first novels don’t sell many copies and, if writers decide … to sidestep the traditional publishing route and sell their stuff by themselves online, they’re having to sell it for virtually nothing – 99p.”
I’m not sure Rankin’s suggested tax breaks are the answer – especially at a time when library funding’s being cut all over the place – but it does demonstrate that whether it’s traditional publishing or self-publishing, most people aren’t making a living from it. The same, of course, applies to any supposedly glamorous kind of work: acting, being a musician, being an artist etc. Â By all means do it because you love it. But don’t do it because you think you’ll make money from it.
I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while: The Guardian, the newspaper I’ve bought every day for more than twenty years, appears to be disappearing before my very eyes. I know why sections are being folded into the main paper, why pagination’s being cut and why some of the best columns are being killed – the paper’s losing tens of millions of quid every year and it’s desperately trying to cut costs – but as I read yet another “this is my final column” sign-off or see another section compressed I can’t help thinking that, if you want to reverse a decline in circulation, getting rid of all your content while charging more for the product probably isn’t the best strategy to adopt.
I’m still paying for my paper, but I’m increasingly wondering why.