Right, I’ve mocked up the temporary cover for it below (though I don’t know how I feel about the words ‘Neal Asher The Parasite’!), I’ll write a blurb and sort out a table of contents too. However, I can’t really do anything about that until I can get back at it, which it’s not letting me do. The Amazon ranking as I write this is 423, but I’m buggered if I know what that might mean in terms of sales.
Right, that was quick. The Parasite, one of the first ‘books’ I published – it is in fact a 40,000 word novella – is now available on Amazon Kindle. I’ve worked through it, but not a huge amount since I didn’t want to change it into something that had ceased to be that original The Parasite. That, I can tell you, was a temptation difficult to resist. I also haven’t got a cover picture or ISBN number up. If I’d used the original cover picture then I would have had to bugger about with copyright issues and I didn’t get an ISBN because I don’t yet know whether it would be worth the money (10 ISBNs for a £100 I’m told)
I hope you all enjoy it.
Okay guys, I’m getting near to publishing The Parasite on Amazon Kindle. Now, in an attempt not to fuck this up too badly, I have a questions:
Presumably, once you’ve bought a book from Amazon for your Kindle you can download it as many times as you like? I’m asking this because I’ve loaded a Word version for Kindle convert and I’m not entirely happy with the formatting. It looks like it might appear without the small margins I’ve seen on pictures of other works on Kindle. If it turns out that it looks crap I need to be sure that I can update it and that you can download it again.
Can you put in margins on your ebook?
Come to think of it … once something is actually published on Kindle can it be edited later?
I am presuming you can change the size of the text on Kindle, can you also change the font?
More questions as they occur to me in the comments…
This bit of frivolity from Nuno Salgueiro….
Here’s the word frequency histogram for Shadow of the Scorpion. The size of each word is proportional to how often that word was used in your novel. I also removed frequent English words, as those would be noise. All this is done in a rather simple way (you probably already know this online tool).
Ahh, the things one does with too much time available… 😛 Hehe, don’t even bother to answer this email, you already wasted too much reading it!
– Nuno
Well I know that – I tried to watch Outcasts.
Stephen Hunt is getting hacked off with the BBC attitude to genre fiction as we can see in his blog post here. There’s also this article at the Guardian. I’m not sure I entirely agree. The Guardian seems more serious about genre fiction than just about any other newspaper, has published the article I’ve just pointed out, and it’s also joined at the hip to the BBC. What do you think? Maybe it’s only mentioned in the elitist spirit of ‘inclusiveness’ of the sneering intellectual pseud?
The good news is that the BBC has recently woken up to the decline of the printed word as an art form, and has belatedly decided to do something about it. The bad news is, shortly after they belatedly spotted all the high street bookshops going bust, they sent in the Sloanes with Purdey shotguns to lecture us on animal welfare.
Recently we’ve had Faulks on Fiction, where one of the bishops of the contemporary fiction high church, Martin Amis, laughed, ‘People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, “If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book.”’
Then we were offered World Book Night and a whole evening of BBC book coverage where the contemporary fiction team was trotted out onto the grass to kick the ball about – solely between themselves, of course.
The highlight of this was presenter Susan Perkins in the ironically entitled The Books We Really Read: a Culture Show Special making it sneeringly clear that she never normally reads any of our lowbrow genre tripe (although she might, you know, give it a whirl now, just for the sake of World Book Night). Fiction has to be painful, a little like school, she explained, before gushing all over some bemused beauty salon clients that her favourite must-read was Dostoevsky, who is all, like, really dark and stuff.
Fantasy was not mentioned once during the Perkins farce, fantasy, the very mother root of literature, JRR Tolkien and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and JK Rowling and Joe Abercrombie and China Miéville and Michael Moorcock all stuffed inside CS Lewis’s wardrobe, the better not to be seen.
Not a single work of science fiction was brought up, so farewell then the brave new worlds of HG Wells, John Wyndham, George Orwell, Iain M Banks, Brian Aldiss, Sir Arthur C Clarke, Aldous Huxley, JD Ballard, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton and Stephen Baxter.
The translator of my books in the Czecho Republic, Petr Kotrle, was rather gloomy about the publishing situation there since the Czech government has now decided to charge 20% VAT on books – like all governments their solution to money problems is more tax. This is rather like a leech attached to a host almost drained of blood deciding that the best thing to do now is suck harder.
Anyway it’s nice to hear that the translation rights for Orbus have been bought by the Czech publisher Polaris. I’m hoping that Polaris buying Orbus is a good sign…
Now, I really must tot up which of my books are translated where. I’m starting to lose track.
It’s an odd experience for me to again read The Parasite while I’m editing it. So much has changed. My English is a lot smoother now and I know how to write sentences that are longer than ten words. I more clearly see the logical connections in the flow of the plot and my paragraphs are … tidier. But beyond the English other differences strike me.
Here was a novella I wrote when I simply did not think to question the idea, often promulgated, that the real bad guys are from the corporation or the company. Think about films like Alien and the recent Smurf movie, think about other films and TV you’ve seen and books you’ve read. When the be-suited killers start turning up they are usually working to cover up the dirty doings of some evil capitalists.
This was also written at a time when I unquestioningly accepted global warming as a threat, hence we have ‘Maldon Island’ (presently an inland town), a one-metre sea-level rise and a requirement for massive sea-level defences. I’ve changed all that now, so if you wish to read it you’ll have to get hold of the old Tanjen copy depicted.
I also bought into the idea of ‘good’ multinational organisations rather than such working for their own advantage, hence the good guys here working for World Health. When I wrote this I was teetering on the edge of but had not yet fallen into the pit of cynical despond. This sort of reminds me that when I was 16 and working I thought ‘I’m a grown up now’, but then about ten years later I looked back on that callow youth and chuckled at his naivety, then ten years after that I looked back at that ‘boy’ in his mid-twenties and thought the same, and so it has been ever since. I suspect we all do this right up to coffin-dodging territory.
Noticeable repetitions in the novella, or rather, bits I borrowed from it and used in my Macmillan books: cloned CIA killers (Tack in Cowl), snuff tapes uploaded to a Golem’s mind (Brass Man), a parasite strengthening its host (The Skinner of course), questions about what it means to be human, and about free-will (All of them)… and plenty more besides. I also noticed I’d named a character here ‘Langstrom’ then did the same in The Departure. I have to wonder at the subconscious source of that name, since the gap between the books has to be at least 15 years. I’ve now changed that name in the updated version of The Parasite.
Here’s a picture Richard Ayling snapped while out and about, to which I just had to add the news story below. He snapped in darkness, hence the graininess. Shades of stumbling on a pub called The Slaughered Lamb in the night…
Police baffled by the gruesome murder of a merchant seaman. Forensics officers were seen entering property here, and an inside source informs us that numerous metallic ‘spiders’ were found in the cellar, along with an aquarium full of large ‘worms’. However, our source cannot explain why officers are consulting with a taxidermist, or why a purported witness to this crime now requires psychiatric counselling.