Category: Books

  • My big fat ebook pricing experiment

    Just a wee update: my month of cut-price ebook selling has been and gone, and I thought I’d share the figures (if you’re new here, I’ve been selling my debut novel online for £1.99 and decided to halve the price to see what would happen). In June, I sold 90 books: 85 in the UK…

  • Ebooks don’t sell on Saturdays: some tentative conclusions from my online adventures so far

    I sold my 251st copy of Coffin Dodgers this morning, and I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve discovered so far. The first and most obvious thing is how important price appears to be: after the initial momentum wears off, sales plummet if you’re pricing at £1.99 (there are other factors – Amazon…

  • Amazon’s “up yours” to Apple

    This is interesting: a cloud-based version of the Kindle app.  I’ve had a quick play with it and it works really well – it’s very fast and good-looking. The help pages say “Kindle Cloud Reader is compatible with PC Windows, or Mac, or Linux computers using the Google Chrome or Safari web browsers, on Linux computers…

  • How much do books actually cost to produce?

    There’s an interesting post on The Guardian books blog today: The true price of publishing. Most people instinctively feel that ebooks should be substantially cheaper than paper books, because an ebook is not physically “made”: there are no printing costs. But if, says Levine, the real value of a book resides in the “text itself”, then the…

  • A very short review of Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran

    I feel a little bit bad about the slagging I gave John Locke’s how-to manual, so I thought I’d redress the balance a little bit by mentioning Let’s Get Digital. If you’re looking for a manual on e-publishing, spend your money on Gaughran’s book, not Locke’s: Gaughran makes it abundantly clear that the work starts when…

  • It was a dark and stormy night

    This year’s Bulwer-Lytton contest winners have been announced. This one is my favourite: As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand—who would take her away from all this—and who would not…

  • A (Glasgow) fair price

    If you haven’t been tempted by my novel Coffin Dodgers so far, allow me to introduce my Super Awesome Holiday Promotion: to celebrate Glasgow Fair, when everybody in Glasgow traditionally takes a fortnight off work and goes to Rothesay, I’m slashing – slashing! – the price of Coffin Dodgers for a wee bit. It’s short,…

  • Ray Banks on ebook piracy

    This is interesting. Ray Banks – who is good – talks about ebooks with Allan Guthrie – who is also good – and the conversation turns to book piracy. Banks: Authors should be pleased they’re being pirated. I know I was. Over the last twenty years or so, branding has shifted from publisher to author,…

  • Coffin Dodgers review

    Tracy from Booked Up says some nice things about my book. This book was a really quick, fun read. I romped through it, amused by the antics of the threesome and curious to find out what was going on and whether justice would be served. It’s set in a world that’s not too hard to…

  • You can’t autograph an ebook

    I’ve bought an awful lot of books over the years, but there’s only one I’m really attached to: Blood’s a Rover by James Ellroy. It’s not my favourite book – it’s not even my favourite Ellroy book – but it stands out from all the others because Ellroy signed it for me. Last night, I…