Category: Books

  • “Mayhem and gags”

    Things that make me happy: Doug Johnstone reviewed Coffin Dodgers in the new issue of The Big Issue Scotland, which is on sale today. The good Mr Johnstone wrote this: Marshall is a journalist turned novelist who has clearly been reading plenty of Chris Brookmyre and Colin Bateman, as his debut fictional outing shares with…

  • Weird things customers say in bookshops

    This cracked me up. By Jen Campbell, via MetaFilter: Customer: Hi, if I buy a book, read it, and bring it back, could I exchange it for another book? Me: No… because then we wouldn’t make any money. Customer: Oh.

  • Review: How I sold 1 million ebooks in 5 months, by John Locke

    It’s a safe bet that any book flogging a “marketing system” will contain a few nuggets of hard information surrounded by thousands of words of padding. John Locke’s how-to is no exception. It sticks closely to the business self-help template, which goes something like this: Page 1 In this book, you’ll discover the secrets of…

  • Don’t pay for my short story

    I decided to publish a short story in ebook format and give it away for free, partly because I think it’s fun and partly because it might help promote Coffin Dodgers. Unfortunately Amazon won’t let you price books at zero any more (it’s apparently part of Amazon’s so far unsuccessful plan to stop book spam),…

  • Faffing around in iMovie

    I’m told that ebook trailers are important, so I had a go at one. I’m easily amused.

  • Coffin dodgers: a nice review and new places to buy it

    Cheery news on the book front: Malachi at allmetaphor.com has given Coffin Dodgers a really good review, and Smashwords has published the book to both Barnes & Noble and iBooks. The latter is a bit cheaper than everywhere else, and I have no idea why. When I find out, I’ll let you know. For now,…

  • Britain’s got ebooks

    A new study on behalf of KPMG suggests that the UK’s getting the hang of this ebook malarkey. Some interesting numbers: consumption of e-books has doubled since September 2009 as people increasingly purchase these products to use on tablets and e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. According to the research, monthly spend on these goods is…

  • Get the British Library on your iPad

    This looks like fun: a free iPad app that lets you browse the British Library’s collection of 19th Century books. From the press release: The app takes advantage of the form and function of iPad, bringing a renewed sense of wonder to the discovery and enjoyment of antiquarian and historical books. Currently the app features over a thousand 19th Century books, but it…

  • Some interesting ebooks and blogs

    I’ve been speaking to some interesting people in ebook-land over the last few weeks, and it’s only fair to give them a mention here. So in no particular order, here goes: Mark Edwards and Louise Voss are doing extraordinary things – as I write this, Catch Your Death and Killing Cupid are at numbers 1…

  • This is a plug

    I made a thing!   So here it is: my debut novel, shiny and new on the Kindle store (or at least, the UK one. The US one needs another couple of days). I’ve set up a page to talk about it without filling the entire front page of this site, but put it this…