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Whether you’re selling ebooks or giving away MP3s, designing T-shirts or creating iPhone apps, if you’re creating something for public consumption then sooner or later somebody’s going to criticise it. How you feel about that will depend on the mood you’re in at the time, the way it’s expressed and the critic’s grip on reality… [more]
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Andy Ihnatko has published a great post about piracy. He’s no fan of the studios, as he makes clear in his post, but the idea that everybody who pirates is a freedom fighter is risible. Here’s part of an imaginary conversation about torrenting Game of Thrones: What’s wrong, Scrumpkin? Oh. You want it right now.… [more]
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Somebody bought the 10,000th copy of Coffin Dodgers last night, and I thought I’d provide a breakdown of the numbers for those of you interested in the whole self-publishing thing. As you’ll see from the figures, it’s clear that giving copies away for free is a brilliant marketing strategy, except when it isn’t, and that… [more]
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A true story: when I used to have a day job, I’d listen to BBC Radio Scotland during my morning commute. I’d listen to the people on comedian Fred MacAulay’s programme and think “that must be a laugh to do. Imagine if that was your job.” These days, I’m one of the people going on… [more]
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From time to time I get a wee panic about Coffin Dodgers and I have to go and check that I took the U2 lyrics out: there’s a scene that revolves around a U2 song, and in the first few drafts of the book I quoted a couple of lines from it. That’s a no-no,… [more]
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I’m buried up to my neck in deadlines just now but I thought I’d post a very quick update on my Coffin Dodgers freebie adventure. The sales figures for the last seven days, not including the freebies, are: UK: 1,547 sales US: 45 sales Germany: 5 sales France: 1 sale So that’s 1,598 sales in… [more]
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In the US, magazines employ (employed?) fact-checkers to go through every line of a piece before publication. This is a dialogue between one such fact-checker and a writer. It made me laugh a lot. FINGAL: Do you have any documentation of that, like notes from your trip? D’AGATA: You’re asking for evidence of a rumor? FINGAL: If you’re… [more]
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It looks like free-as-a-marketing-strategy works: since Coffin Dodgers’ price tag reappeared, it’s sold enough copies to crack the Kindle top 100 in the UK. It’s currently sitting there at 91, and it’s number 1 in technothrillers and number 3 in humorous fiction. I’m quite pleased about that. [more]
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Did you take advantage of yesterday’s Coffin Dodgers freebie? If you did, you weren’t the only one: some 3,515 other people did too. That’s in no small part due to the people who posted and tweeted about it – if you were one of them, thanks. If you’re wondering why I did it, it’s a… [more]
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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… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
