Ten Things I Learned Since Saturday

1: The Trap of Solid Gold is an excellent blog dedicated to the work of John D MacDonald, creator of Travis McGee and author of many other great paperback originals, my favourite of which is Soft Touch.

2: Lawrence Block has gone 'indie' by self-publishing a Matt Scudder short story collection. He explains why here.

3: Daily sales of 18-25 since Saturday are enough for Two-Way Split to nose into the top 100 thrillers on Amazon UK. The week-on-week sales increase is almost certainly driven by Amazon's recommendations. First month's sales were 155. Already this month: 135. Total UK sales still lag behind the US (739/872), which you'd never guess from their current rankings: under 500 in the UK and over 15,000 in the US.

4: Edinburgh has an exciting new bookstore: Pulp Fiction.

5: Penguin, the publishing house that invented the mass market paperback, believes that the format will all but disappear, according to Publishing Perspectives: “in essence, the mass market is becoming digital.”

6: DD Scott demonstrates the power of free, selling more books in a month than in the previous year: more at the Writer's Guide to e-Publishing. 

7: eReaderIQ is a free service that – among other things – lets you know when a Kindle title you're interested in comes down in price.

8: The Google eBookstore is now in the UK. It's far from intuitive for publishers. Spent 30 minutes trying to trying to find out if I could sign up and getting constantly directed to blank screens. End result: I'm no wiser than I was when I started. So I haven't really learned anything much at all. Better have another #8.

8: Waterstone's '3 for 2' price promo is what they were known for.

9: The Kindle will be available in France from Oct 14th. Wonder how long before Spain.

10: And finally, Grift Magazine claim there's something interesting in the offing. “There are a lot of people publishing eBooks out there these days, either on their own or with the help of a publisher – be it bootstrapping indie or Big 6 imprint — and it is clearly the future of publishing. The winners will be the ones who innovate, do something different. I’ve been given a sneak peek at one such operation, about which I can’t report much, but suffice to say they’ll be making headlines soon.”

Some great writers on board there: Anthony Neil Smith, Ray Banks, Douglas Lindsay, Gerard Brennan. I've heard rumours of a few others too. Looks to be an exciting line-up.