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, IBOOKS BARGAIN etc :)

Update: I know what’s happened now. iTunes has various pricing tiers, and when the price is converted from dollars to pounds you don’t always end up with the price you expect. In many cases it ups the price, but in my case it cut it quite dramatically. You’ve got 24 hours before the pricing error is fixed :)

Here’s a bit of the review:

There has been a catastrophic collapse in the birth rate and an ageing population is reacting badly.

Sound familiar? If so, don’t jump to conclusions. Gary Marshall’s entertaining dystopian thriller is no Children of Men. His senior citizens are not just old. They’re old and rich.

Malachi’s review is here, and the Barnes and Noble and iBooks links are on the Coffin Dodgers page over here.

I hope you don’t mind the odd book plug here: I’ve no intention of turning this blog into a “BUY BUY BUY” monstrosity, but it’s nice to jump around when somebody says something nice about your work.

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 almost equalling the amount of money splashed out on music via the internet.

The average shopper spends £4 per month on e-books, which is double what is spent on online games and four times as much as what people pay for streamed TV. On average, downloaded music accounts for £5 of consumers’ monthly disposable income.

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 way: it’s a scientific fact that people who buy Coffin Dodgers are better dancers, better lovers, better drivers and better all-round human beings than the rest of the population. If you fancy telling other people about that, I’d be very grateful.икони

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m about to put my novel online in various ebook formats, and part of the process is working out how much to charge. It’s a controversial topic, so it was nice to see this post by John Rickards (which came to me via the superb Loud blog). As Rickards points out, joining the “buy my book for 70p!” movement isn’t necessarily a great idea:

You’re pandering to a dangerous kind of hysteria that sees the stuff that we produce as a commodity with almost no inherent value. Any kind of industry that drives its prices down as close to zero as it can get, and which has no other revenue stream at all, dies on its arse. How long do you think superstores would stay in business if all they had were their loss leaders on the shelves?

If you’re interested in electronic publishing, the whole post is well worth your time. I particularly liked this bit:

I’ll reiterate: this is the same as the cost of a cup of coffee. And of so many of those cheap smartphone apps you and I purchase like candy.

That’s pretty much my thinking too.

If I can ever persuade Amazon to charge the right price (I’m having a few issues with Amazon just now, so if you spot Coffin Dodgers in the Kindle Store before I tell everybody that it’s on sale you may end up with a not-quite-perfect version) I’m going to be charging $2.99US/£1.99GBP for the ebook of Coffin Dodgers.

For what it’s worth, my cut of that is around a pound per book (and that’s taxable, of course). The likelihood that I’ll even recoup the cost of the beers I drank while writing it, let alone the cost of time spent editing and formatting it, is pretty slim.

At 70p, your cut is even smaller: after VAT, Amazon’s delivery charges and Amazon’s 65% cut, you’re left with pennies. In the unlikely event that you sell even 10,000 copies, you’ll be lucky to make two thousand quid. Do a much more likely 1,000 copies and you’ll make around £200. That’s £200, before tax, for two years’ work.

I don’t think £1.99 for a book is excessive, particularly as (unless I’ve made a complete arse of things) I’m letting readers on every ebook platform sample the first fifth of the book for free. If you’re that far into the book you can be pretty sure of what you’re getting for your two quid. I’ve also gone for the DRM-free, go-ahead-and-lend-it options on Amazon, so I’m hardly trying to persuade people to hand over cash for something they can’t sample.

I could charge less, but I don’t want to. As Rickards puts it, if you’re selling too cheap you’re saying:

“Buy this, it’s cheap!” rather than “Buy this, it’s good!”

I completely understand the rationale behind charging less – I’ve spoken to authors for whom that’s worked – but it’s a game I don’t want to play.

More to the point, it’s a game I can’t afford to play. Writing Coffin Dodgers was fun, but it was fun that took every second of spare time I had for five months – and if you’re a parent, you’ll know how precious spare time can be. And writing was the easy bit. Writing the first draft took a few months, but the next seven drafts took a year and a half of RSI-inducing extra-curricular work. Believe me, that wasn’t fun – and neither is buggering about with ebook publishing platforms, checking formatting and wondering why Amazon’s system is so bloody frustrating.

I’m not doing this for the money – I’ve junked another, much more commercial novel because Coffin Dodgers’ world is the one I want to spend time in – but I’m not an idiot either: time spent writing (or editing, or formatting) a book is time I could be spending on paid journalism, or on pitching for paid work, or recording stuff in Logic, or on killing space monsters on Xbox.

This turned out a bit longer than I intended, so I’ll wrap up: I’ll be plugging my book in a day or two. If you’d like to buy it, that’d be great. If you don’t, I hope the plugging isn’t too annoying.

The book isn’t ready yet but I thought Ronnie Brown’s cover design was too good to keep under wraps. More soon.

This is wonderful.

I was at a Kurt Vonnegut talk in New York a few years ago. Talking about writing, life, and everything.

He explained why people have such a need for drama in their life.

He said, “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let’s look at a few examples.”

[Via Spikemagazine.com]

A superb post by Famous Monster in a thread about self-publishing:

One of these days I will get around to writing just the absolute most loathsome right-wing Clancy-esque military scifi I can possibly muster. I mean somewhere between John Norman and John Ringo and maybe Terry Goodkind. Like all about a guy who is the best at everything and has the most sex with the hottest girls and kills terrorists and does the most martial arts.

I abandoned the idea initially because I was worried that people would miss the satire.

It is now clear to me that the folks who miss the satire may be a tremendous source of income.