New ebook publisher Blasted Heath (vested interest alert: they’re friends of mine and occasional employers) gave me one of these the other night.
It’s the Blasted Boxset, 5 ebooks on a USB drive in a presentation tin.
I think it’s a really good idea, and hopefully there will be more like it: while ebooks are wonderful things, if you want to give one as a gift you’re reduced to printing a receipt on an inkjet.
I’m really taken by children’s book apps, and you can get an award-winning one for free: the Jack and the Beanstalk iPad/iPhone app is available here. I haven’t tried this one yet, but it looks like fun.
The deluxe version of the REM best-of (“Part Lies, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011) on iTunes is superb value for money: 40 songs and a further twelve videos for £11.99.
If you’re interested, the videos are for Radio Free Europe, Talk About The Passion, Fall On Me, The One I Love, Orange Crush, Losing My Religion, Man on the Moon, What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?, All The Way To Reno, Leaving New York, Supernatural Superserious and Uberlin. That last one’s from the most recent album and is a beautiful wee song.
See you at the overpriced reunion tour in ten years…
Update: Coffin Dodgers became a proper bestseller in February 2012, topping Amazon UK’s humour chart and breaking into the overall top 40 too.
I’m quite delighted to see that Coffin Dodgers is currently number 20 in Amazon UK’s Books > Fiction > Humour chart, as well as number 33 in Kindle Store > Books > Humour and number 56 in Books > Humour > Fiction. I can’t say being in the top 20 has changed my life, but it’s certainly helping to sell more books: total sales are at 913*, and I’m selling around ten books per day at the moment.
If you’re interested, my highest overall chart placing so far is #608 “out of over 400,000 books in the Kindle Store”, Amazon tells me. That’s quite good, isn’t it?
I mentioned before that sales were overwhelmingly from the UK, and that’s still very much the case: for every 1 ebook I sell in the US, I sell 25 books over here.
Thanks once again to everyone who’s been nice about it, reviewed it or told anyone else about it. I’m very grateful.
I am still working on another book, but it’ll be months before I’ve got anything sensible to say about it.
* It might be higher than that: anything sold through Smashwords, such as iBooks, Sony or Kobo sales, takes ages to be reported.Â
On the face of it, Internet Explorer doesn’t have much in common with Sugababes: IE isn’t beautiful, doesn’t sing and isn’t likely to dress in a primary-coloured PVC dominatrix outfit to perform at G-A-Y.
However, they’re not as different as you might think.
Robyn Wilder’s description of being an ex-smoker is perfect.
I am a retired cigarette enthusiast, which brings with it the following woes:
- Getting up from my desk at the end of the day and all my joints cracking at once because cigarette breaks are the only breaks I know
- Dreaming that I had a cigarette, and waking up all a-panic
- A sudden passion for biscuits
- Having to ransack the house for a lighter when I want to light a candle
- Unquenchable Haribo Tangfastic addiction
- The three seconds between me telling a smoker I don’t smoke anymore, and them inevitably telling me about all the times they’ve tried to give up
- Those awkward silences at the pub that you can’t break by just fucking off outside for a cigarette
- The fact that my risk of emphysema and various cancers is only slightly reduced. Slightly reduced? Are you kidding me? I have a pot belly now
- Social acceptance from smug, evangelical ex-smokers.
I’m hopeless at catching programmes when they’re actually broadcast, so it’s taken me a while to get round to watching the DCI Banks adaptations of Peter Robinson’s books. I like the books, but I encountered exactly the same problem I had with the recent dramatisation of Mark Billingham’s DI Thorne novels. No, not the annoying sidekick, or the maverick cop breaks the rules but always gets his man blah blah blah… the problem I had was overacting. It was bad in Thorne, but even worse in Banks.
Put it this way: if you created a drinking game where you had to down a shot every time DCI Banks made this face:
You’d be very pissed very, very quickly.
That face put me off the programme. I mean it. It’s not just his “I’m angry at a suspect” face. It’s his “I wish I’d had some toast before leaving the house” face, his “I wonder what I’ll have for my tea” face and his “I’m feeling quite chipper today, actually” face.
I don’t get it. Was there a memo that says all TV detectives are allowed two facial expressions, Really Pissed Off and Absolutely Fucking Furious?
A new ebook publisher launches later today: Blasted Heath. I need to declare an interest – one of the founders is a friend of mine who occasionally pays me to write things – but I think what they’re doing is really interesting: they’re picking authors who they believe deserve a bigger profile and marketing the hell out of them. I’ve read two of the launch authors – Ray Banks and Douglas Lindsay – and loved their books, so if BH can maintain that level of quality they’re on to a winner.
I like some of their other ideas too: ebooks are DRM-free and provided in the major file formats (Kindle, ePub and PDF) to ensure maximum compatibility, and if you fancy giving books as a gift there’s a nice wee box set with the books on USB stick inside a presentation case. I know both Blasted Heathens, Kyle and Allan, and they’re definitely on the side of the angels.
Blasted Heath is giving away a different book every day this week, so if you fancy something a bit different you should pop along. Today’s giveaway, Douglas Lindsay’s The End of Days, is a hoot.
I love Tim Dorsey, and I don’t need to finish When Elves Attack to urge everyone to buy it. It’s typical Dorsey, which means it’s superbly deranged Floridian tomfoolery that had me hooting with delight by the second paragraph – which, in this case, is a 93-year-old explaining why she’s gone off sex. If you haven’t read Dorsey and found Coffin Dodgers even remotely funny, you really ought to check out the work of the master.
Nokia’s keynote this morning wasn’t quite what I was hoping for.Â
“Our ambition is to surprise you at every turn,” said Kevin Shields, a man whose job title – senior vice president of program and product management for the smart device – is longer than many people’s lives.
And then he started shouting.
“It looks AWESOME!” he bellowed, channelling his inner Ballmer and scaring the hell out of the first six rows. “It feels GREAT in your hand!” he added, frightening everybody again. “It SCREAMS premium!” he screamed.