Ten Things That Happened While I Was In Bath

Bath in a bookshop in Bath
photo by Janet McKnight

Just back from a short and most pleasant visit to Bath. Still catching up but here's a few things that happened while I was gone:

I: Bloody Scotland launched its website, and very pretty it is too. There's also news of a short story competition that could see you published in a Blasted Heath ebook anthology.

II: Dead End Follies listed Ten Literary People On The Web That You Absolutely Need To Know and were kind enough to mention me. "I suspect Allan has eight pairs of arms, six brains and needs about twenty minutes of sleep a night for optimal functioning." I wish.

III: Anthony Neil Smith made his excellent Choke On Your Lies free for Kindle on Friday. It goes back to 'paid' on Monday so grab it while you can.

IV: Liberties Press has reduced the price of Declan Burke's Irish Book Awards-shortlisted Absolute Zero Cool to £1.95.

V: Speaking of Dec, here's a piece on ebook pricing he wrote for The Irish Times. And here's another interesting piece on ebook pricing from Digital Book World, specifically in relation to the impact of Amazon's KDP Select.

VI: Here's a chance to win Gerard Brennan's chapbook: Possession Obsession And A Diesel Compression Engine.

VII: NoirCon 2012 looms ever closer, with distinguished guest Lawrence Block and keynote speaker Robert Olen Butler (this I'd love to hear: Butler's book on writing fiction, From Where You Dream, is a mind-blower).

VIII: Benedicte Page gave Blasted Heath's February titles. Ray Banks's Wolf Tickets and Douglas Lindsay's The Unburied Dead a nice shout-out in her ebooks round-up in The Guardian.

IX: eBooknewser lists 10 Boards For Ebook Fans from new social networking site, Pinterest.

X: Some much-appreciated and very inspiring Amazon customer reviews have appeared for a few of my books. Two-Way Split is described as having "a gut-knotting finale that unfurls with the inevitability of all great tragedy and the best nasty sex ever" (thanks, Maya!); Savage Night is described as being "Shakespearean in scope and theme, unrelenting, tragic ... a powerful revenge tale, in which violence, fate, love, hate and even humor commingle like blood and wine, one barely distinguishable from the other" (thanks, Marilyn!); and finally "the writing quality is high, the stories are top notch, and this piece is worth your attention" (thanks, Pearce!) is a terrific response to Hilda's Big Day Out.

Ten Short Bits Of News And Info

1: If you're in Glasgow and free on Mon 30th January, I'll be giving a talk at the University of Strathclyde. This is open to the public, entry is free, and kicks off at 5pm. More details can be found here.

2: Blasted Heath has launched a new daily book recommendation with the bewitching acronym of #broth (Book Recommendation On The Heath). You can join in too. Check it out here.

3: You may have noticed that Criminal-E has been on something of an interview hiatus. Well, that's about to end very soon. I have some fine ebook crime writers lined up who will be revealing all. Well, maybe not all. Although that's an idea...

4: A while back I created a highly indulgent list of my top 200 noir fiction titles. It stops in 1997. My new Italian publisher, Revolver, has asked if I'll update it with a list of the best noir since then. Looking forward to this.

5: More Blasted Heath news. Next month sees the launch of The Unburied Dead by Douglas Lindsay and Wolf Tickets by Ray Banks, stonking books both.

6: And more events: Stuart MacBride is at Blackwell's in Edinburgh on Thu Feb 2nd (free, 6.30pm) and Len Wanner will be grilling Tony Black at Mayfield Library in Dalkeith on Sat 4th Feb (free, 6pm).

7: Will the big publishers drop DRM? Nice to see it being advocated at least. Bookseller Backed By Big Publishers Advocates Abandoning Digital Rights Management.

8: There's some pretty interesting information to be gleaned from Verso's 2011 Survey of Book-Buying Behaviour.

9: I'm very happy to say that the excellent Connie Haag is translating Bye Bye Baby for the German digital market.

10: And finally, I'm currently revising Kiss Her Goodbye, which will be the next of my novels out on Kindle. Here's a first look at the cover.

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.