___WORDS FROM ME_____________________________________

a little bite of christmas

Season's greetings, one and all.
Yup. It's that time of the year, folks, when I get to remind you that in the Free Fiction section of this blog you can read a short Chrismas story . . . For Free!

I know, I'm so giving . . .

It's called "Christmas Calories", and you can get to it easily by clicking Here.

Merry Christmas, "Ho, ho, ho," and all of that.

Mark

paperback writing

I haven't seen the cover art yet, so can't post any images, but in the spirit of full disclosure I just thought I'd mention that my western from the other year, NO FIRE WITHOUT SMOKE, is due a paperback release in the first quarter of 2019. It's being published by Throrpe, as part of their Linford Westerns range, and they're the same lovely people who put out the paperback of my first western, HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF.

NO FIRE's official release date is January 1st, but I can't see many people out on New Year's Day seeking it out. Still, it should be good.  We of course thank the people at Thorpe kindly and look forward to seeing the copies out there in the real world.

I'll just reiterate something I've said before, because it bears repeating and remembering. It's a treat to be published, and shouldn't be taken lightly. Seeing a book alive and in print is a rare enough and special thing, given how many folk are out there, writing without reward. Seeing a book go from hardback into paperback is a heart warming experience, and a help getting through the cold months of winter.

So. The paperback of NO FIRE WITHOUT SMOKE should be in the libraries next year, and there will be copies available on all the good - and some of the not so good - bookselling websites.

(Incidentally, and should you be interested, I've notied that a couple of copies of the hardcover of NO FIRE have sprung into existence on amazon.co.uk. For a while no such copies were available. Both the hardcover and paperback of BLACK WOLF sold out quickly, and are only available through dealers these days, some of which I would suggest are being a bit hopeful by listing the hardcover for over a hundred pounds . . . But, you know, maybe they have children to feed. If you so fancy, you're allowed to buy a copy of NO FIRE at less than the cover price on amazon. I promise you, it's fine. It's no crime. And Christmas is coming, if you were still looking for gifts . . . Click here for a copy.)

north of midnight

It's that month again, the one where the witchy goings on go on, and the ghosts and the ghoulies come out to play. It's that time when the leaves on the tree light up, and then fall and make rust of the gutters and the pavements. It's the time when kids come knocking on your door for goodies and the cold comes nipping at your bones. It's also that time when I have a new book out and it is, appropriately, witchy-ish, ghostly-ish, and halloween-ish. (I decided not to write ghoulies-ish, because, well, you know . . .) Anyway, it's called North of Midnight, and it is a collection of darkly slanted tales, all with a kink of the supernatural to them. Just right for this time of year, perhaps.

There are nine pieces in North of Midnight, of which about half of the content is published for the first time. Technically, all but two of the pieces should have been published before, but owing to magazines and anthologies collapsing it just never happened. And rather than send the tales out elsewhere, I elected to put them together and make a collection. It's not a massive collection. It's about 240 pages long, if we're to believe the page count, and I think that's a nice length. I'm not a big fan of enormous anthologies and collections. The commitment required to start new story after new story can be a bit too much to ask a reader over the course of 400 or 500 pages. That's how I feel anyway. Give me a 130-pager or at a push a 250-pager any day of the week. Sometimes less is more, and as it's true about the prose in a short story, it makes sense to me that it should be true about how many pages there should be in a collection.

I won't say much about the pieces inside, other than that if you're read my supernatural-flavoured tales in books and magazines, then you'll have an idea of what they are about. If you haven't read any of those pieces before, then hey, it can be a surprise.

North of Midnight is available as a paperback:

HERE for you if you're in the UK

HERE for you if you're in the USA

and via your own local amazon store if you're in the EU (here's the German link. Here's the French. Both are written in English).

All being well, an ebook version should be available before or around the New Year, via Kobo and Amazon Kindle.

Thanks for reading.

Happy Halloween.



the deception glass


So I’ve been quiet. Or I have been as far as the e-ther is concerned. Has anyone noticed? Probably not. And fewer have probably cared. But such is life.


I have been a bit lax, though, I must admit, in recording a few more blog entries. And at least one is deserved.

Which of course you can take either way . . .

So. Deserved or not, here we are.

As sales of my YA/portal fantasy novel A Clash of Ichor and Blood roared off to a terrible start and then declined rapidly, I put up a bit of a promotional ebook short story on a couple of ebook retailers’ sites. It’s a piece called "The Deception Glass", and like A Clash of Ichor and Blood, it’s low-fantasy. And just what, I hear you ask, is low-fantasy? It’s essentially fantasy linked to a real-world setting, in the way that CS Lewis’s fantasies were, rather than set in the high-fantasy realm of Tolkien’s otherworldly Lord of the Rings. To use but two of the most famous examples.

"The Deception Glass" is just shy of 7,000 words, and comes with the first few chapters of A Clash of Ichor and Blood with it, to tempt the unwary into parting with the price of, oh, say a cup of tea and a half for the ebook . . . or a few notes more for a rather handsome and nicely designed UK trade paperback edition. Or US trade paperback edition for that matter.

If you are wise and lucky enough to be a Kobo owner (or at least have installed the Kobo reading app on your smart device of choice and/or affordability) then you can own a copy of "The Deception Glass" for free. If however, you are one of the crowd and have opted for the big river company Kindle e-reader (or app) I am afraid that – as of the moment – it’ll cost you money. Less than most places will sell you a cup of tea for, it’s true, but it’s still money.

Why does one cost money and the other not? Simply because Amazon doesn’t allow you to list books for free. Pretty much all the titles you see on there for nothing have been price-matched to a competitor’s price. So if someone gives a tale or book away for free on Kobo, it can take a while for Amazon to follow suit. If enough people get in touch with Amazon and say, Oi, it’s free on Kobo, then they might knock the price down to free. But I have no real say in this in relation to my tale.

It is my intention to put perhaps a slightly longer version of "The Deception Glass" into a collection at some point (yeah, yeah – always in the future with you, Lynchy. . .), but for now it’s my hope that someone somewhere might stumble across it, maybe download it, maybe even read, and perhaps – long shot – like it . . . and then buy A Clash of Ichor and Blood after reading it. They might even put up a nice review for it. Who knows?

If not, then not. But a boy has to hope.

Anyway, the image of A Clash of Ichor and Blood over to the right on this screen should have links to the ebook versions of the novels.

 Here's a link to the UK free version of The Deception Glass. (Click on this, no matter which country you are in, and theoretically it should take you to the Kobo free version in your own land. If that doesn't work, there are links in the Free Fiction section of this website.) Also, while we're at it, here's a  link to the UK Amazon version. The image of the short on the right hand sidebar should have links too. I sincerely appreciate any purchase, whether you pay for it or not.

In the meantime, what else have I been doing? Getting iller, slowly going about the process for getting checked for cancer (something which may well curtail the future plans I mentioned above, depending on the results, should I actually find the strength to get through the tests), somehow staggering over the line with a second draft of a new book that may or may not be called Tindermass if it is ever to see the light of day, and trying to look after people and myself as best I can. It ain’t easy, believe me. I had a nice few days away with my special one, up in the Lake District, and the sun was quite kind too. What does tomorrow bring? Time of its own, long or short.

Take care.

down the well


In a recent interview George R.R. Martin talked about life before the big success of his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. (That’s the Game of Thrones thingy, for those few of you not in the know.) He talked the usual stuff, characters, historical analogies, world building, the pressure to complete a big series, and so on; but he also talked about being a writer and how it used to be, before the bestseller charts and a hit TV show changed everything for him. It was good, and I enjoyed reading it. But the bit in the interview that struck home with me was when he said he’d spend a couple of years writing a book and then, when it came out, it was like he’d thrown it down a well for all the difference it seemed to make.

Well . . .

You don’t expect fame. You don’t expect riches and to be lauded with praise. (If you do, you’re really in the wrong profession, buster, because believe me, the statistics are heavily against you.) But when you put all that time in trying to make the best book you can, it’s nice when, now and again, someone actually reads your book.

It’s a rarer thing than you might expect. Book sales overall are not that large given the population of any particular country, and it seems there are fewer and fewer readers in the world, something that can’t be true given the need to be literate in a computer age. They’re out there, are readers (I’m one of them, and I assume you are, because you’re reading this blog); the thing is, they’re just not reading many of us.

Most of my readers have never heard of me. They pick my books up from the genre section in the library, read them – sometimes all of the book, and I suspect sometimes not – and then they return them and take someone else’s book out. They’re there for the genre, not me.

That’s fine. That’s great actually. On some level, it’s probably how it should be. People might find you, and suddenly take to you and read your other stuff after stumbling upon one title of yours that they like. They might not, because tastes differ, and just carry on going from genre author to genre author. And that’s fine too. It’s nice to be quietly anonymous while one of your books is calmly getting on with its business of being read without telling you. It doesn’t feel like there’s any pressure then.

Sometimes I sneak a peek, though, to see what’s going off. Now and again, as a sort of off shoot of a Google vanity search, I’ll dip into the online catalogue of a library and hunt for my stuff. It’s nice to see your titles out on loan. It’s also a little strange, to think that people you have never met are reading your books. It buoys up the confidence, gives you a little warm feeling inside.

But your books aren’t always out on loan. And for most of the time it still feels like you’ve dropped a stone into a large circle of darkness and are counting away, waiting to hear some sort of sound come echoing back up from deep down below, even if it’s only the crack of things breaking up when they’ve reached rock bottom, with no liquid dream to settle into. The book is published, and then it’s gone.

Is it worth the hard work and effort it took to get that far, though?

You know, for want of something better to do, I think it is.

Which is why I am here, standing slightly to one side of my usual place when I have a new book out, trade paperback and ebook in hand this time, looking down into a well that seems deeper and darker than any well I’ve dropped a book into before. Different well, different darkness, potentially a fathomless pit.

But maybe it’s a wishing well.

Maybe.

I just don’t know.

You see, I’m doing things differently, because I wanted to. Because I think I needed to. If you keep repeating the same actions and expect a different outcome, you’re going to be disappointed.  I’ve written a book, a sort of YA dark fantasy that might actually be a Crossover novel. It’s a tricky one to pigeonhole. I’m calling it A Clash of Ichor and Blood and keeping my fingers crossed that someone, somewhere, might read it. Maybe more than someone. Maybe lots of someones.

That would be nice. But I think it’s unlikely. Unless Chance intervenes, or Fate, whichever is less capricious; or a bit of friendly help sticks and makes a difference.

Still, you don’t know.

A Clash of Ichor and Blood is being published as a trade paperback through Amazon, and as an ebook through Amazon and Kobo. Hopefully it will make its e-way out onto other platforms at a later date. It doesn’t have a traditional publisher behind it. This time there aren’t likely to be any library sales. If anyone reads this book, then it may well be because I have given them a paperback copy or they have bought a digital edition at a very favourable price – see your local Amazon and Kobo store for details, folks – or they’ve found it on a pirate site for free.

The book is available now in its trade paperback format. It’s about 106,00 words long, which, given the font I’ve gone for and the size of the typeface, means it’s about 297 pages long. I’ve tried to price the book competitively, so that not only does it cost just a little more than half the price of many trade paperbacks these days, but it also hits the “free delivery” mark Amazon offers for postage of books. If you like your books physical, I think this is a good and nice thing that should bring a smile to your face.

If, however, you like reading electronically, on your phone or tablet via an app, or on an e-reader – which is my own preferred method of devouring ebooks – then Kobo and Amazon will have the ebook all set for delivery to you at what I hope is a fair and very competitive price. (I mean, come on – you’ll pay more for a fancy cup of coffee than you will for the ebook of A Clash of Ichor and Blood. How could you not buy it? It’d be crazy not to.)  The ebook is coming out this Sunday, on April the 15th.

I hope you can get a copy of the book in one format or another. If you do, I hope you read it. I hope you like it. I hope that it was worth it, for both of us.

I wish you well.



(The ebook, incidentally, is available without Digital Rights management applied, meaning you can take the epub or mobi file and convert it to any format you like, put it on any device capable of reading your chosen format, and also give it away to friends and enemies. I’d prefer it if they bought a copy. But if they can’t afford it, or wouldn’t buy it other than for free, what the hell – let’s get the damn thing get read. I can always drink rainwater and eat flies.)

what i wouldn't give for kindle unlimited

It’s been a while since I mentioned my ebook novella What I Wouldn’t Give. It’s been a while since anyone else mentioned it too. And still longer since anyone bought a copy.

I’m not particularly surprised. The ebook novella was always an experiment for me, a way of learning how to format such a book, create a cover for it, and to publish it myself for as little money as possible. It wasn’t something that I was going to “market” like a professional. Hell, I doubt I’ll ever do anything like a professional; I rather suspect I’ll be a hopeless amateur the rest of my life. The plan was to simply get it up and available and see what happened. Anyway . . .

The easiest way to go about this was through Amazon, and so that’s where I went to do it. After all, there were plenty of “how to” articles floating around the internet, and some YouTube videos that helped as well; enough of them for me to grasp the basics and put out a no frills ebook.

Being a straightforward novella, What I Wouldn’t Give didn’t require me to insert a contents page or much of the jazzy stuff that can be put into ebooks these days, such as hypertext and so on. It felt like all I had to do was get the writing right, and format away. Simples, as the Meerkats say. All the same, I did a bit of interior work on the book. For instance, starting sections in Bold type, just to differentiate sections from what had gone before, and to make the text look interesting before you even started reading it. (You can catch up about that stuff here.)

It had been in my mind, back then, to make the novella available on other platforms too, after a while: Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and anywhere else that might offer a place to sell it. But that proved more complicated than I was ready for at the time. It was also going to be potentially costly. Where Amazon aced it over most of its competitors was by allowing you to list your ebook without paying for an ISBN or the near-mythical eISBN. (In some countries ISBNs are free; in the UK they are anything but free. And when the budget for the project is the change in your butt cheek pocket, this is a no-go area.)

That’s slowly changed and making use of the other platforms is now a real and desirable possibility. Though Kobo and others prefer an ISBN, to make use of all of their facilities, they now appear to offer in-store equivalents.  Enough to at least get you off the ground. Suddenly, “going wide”, as they call it, isn’t as costly as it once was. And given the dangers inherent when companies have such market dominance they are almost a monopoly, I think more and more writers want to spread the availability of their books, rather than find the terms of their agreements a little one-sided in any one particular company’s favour, and then wind up at the bottom end of the gig economy, out on the street with a Homeless and Boneless sign pencilled on a piece of cardboard.

But ever the contrarian (a word I may have just made up, or at the least misspelled) I have just signed the ebook up to Kindle Unlimited, making it uniquely available through Amazon.  Partly this is laziness, partly it’s me wanting to see if it makes a difference to the number of people who have read it. On Kindle Unlimited it’s possible to borrow the ebook for free, rather than pay the staggeringly high amount of 99p for it (less than a cup of coffee from your favourite coffee chain).

Despite mentioning the ebook in author biographies attached to short story sales – the one bit of marketing you could say I have done – sales of What I Wouldn’t Give have hardly been impressive, even though some kindly souls have put up some nice reviews for the tale. One of the mistakes I’d made was to discourage people from reviewing the title on Amazon; I hadn’t realised that the reviews also boost its visibility and store position and that it’s not simply down to sales alone. Told you I was a hopeless amateur. But it is what it is.

It’s my hope that the Kindle Unlimited offer might see someone else read the piece. If someone does, they might even be nice enough to review it for me.

To read What I Wouldn’t Give in the US, click here.

To read What I Wouldn’t Give in the UK, click here.

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