Tag: Books

Norman Spinrad

Posted on by Neal Asher

Seems Norman Spinrad is dipping his toes in the ebook market. I smell revolution in the air.

I’ve made backlist novel titles and even a couple of original collections available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as ebooks, and so am familiar with the deal and its numbers. You can set your own prices, but they can’t be lower than $2.99. That’s not a high price for a novelette, about the cost of two lousy beers or one good one in the store. And the writer gets 70%. Try to get a royalty rate like that with a traditional paperbound publisher!

Mindgames: Fool's Mate

Posted on by Neal Asher
Prior to 1990 and maybe a few years afterwards, before my hair started to turn grey and before I becamesuch a cynic, I was a member of an ‘SF folio’ – a postal workshop. This consisted of a group of writers scattered about the country mailing each other their work for criticism. The postal folio contained a list of addresses, when I received it I inserted a chapter, or a short story or some other piece of writing, wrote criticisms of each other piece in the folio, then posted it on to the next person on the list. By the time it came back to me I had received criticisms of my piece from every other writer. I then took out my previous piece of work and inserted my next, and so the process continued.

Note: I can’t remember all the names of the authors in that folio, but do know that one of them was a guy called Conrad Williams, who you might be familiar with. Also, for those wannabe writers reading this, you can now find Internet versions of the above.

I wrote a novella during this called ‘To Die But Once’ and also began to have a smattering of successes in the small presses – for which payment was usually just a free copy of the magazine concerned – and I was always searching for new markets. I used to read ‘Writing Magazine’ and in there I found out about a new publishing company called Club 199 who were looking for novellas of about 40,000 words for which they gave a flat payment of £1000. I duly scrubbed up the aforementioned novella and sent it off. When I received the phone call telling me my piece had been accepted, I fell on the floor. Wow! I was being paid real money for my work!

Trying to be professional I then immediately went on to write another 40,000 word novella for the same market. This was The Parasite. Meanwhile Gordon McGregor’s Club 199 decided on a better title for ‘To Die But Once’ and changed the title to ‘Mindgames: Fool’s Mate’. It was published, I got my money, and then a short while afterwards Club 199 went skint. Having by then managed to make a small name for myself in the small presses I got The Parasite published with Tanjen, followed that with The Engineer and continued my climb towards Macmillan. I am, I think it’s safe to say, a ‘time served’ writer.

With this Kindle route to publication now available I’m once again going through ‘Fool’s Mate’. There’s a fair bit of work to do since the file is one that I converted from Wordstar on a 5.25 inch floppy disc – perhaps both of these are things that some of you have never even used. When I first converted it I had to employ find-and-replace to change words that had become hieroglyphs back into words again. Now I have to sort out formatting that’s all over the place, and of course plenty of crappy English. The novella is stunningly naïve, but fun. I’m not going to hammer it too much and when it’s ready it’ll be another one for Kindle publication.

5 Desert Island Reads — Phil Middleton

Posted on by Neal Asher

Hello Neal,

Well, that was a challenge and if you give me another ten minutes I’ll change them all again.

One thing I have now noticed is that most of the books I read these days are multiple volume stories. There are many authors I could include, ASHER, Hamilton, Clark, Reynolds, Banks but it’s always nice to have some variation. Of course if I washed up on a desert island with my luck the only other survivor would be the crate of Mills and Boon!

Jack the Bodiless by Julian May. After borrowing The Saga of the Exiles from a friend and thoroughly enjoying it I moved on to this, The Galactic Milieu series. Mankind’s telepathic abilities awake and while they argue and fight among themselves the rest of the galaxy watches, for a while anyway. I just liked the concept and as most of the story was set in modern times you can relate to it a little more. Unfortunately Mays later books did nothing for me.

Illium by Dan Simmons. Now here’s an author that can knock out a mean book. Dan, as already mentioned by Rob Darby, is probably best known for The Hyperion books, which I have read, but my preference is for Illium/Olympus. The siege of Troy mixed with sentient robots and strange goings-on on planet earth, what more could you ask for. Dan is one of these authors who can turn his hand to anything it appears; SF, detectives, horror.

Evolution by Stephen Baxter. Where does this man get his ideas from? Mammoths, alternate history, “human” civilizations existing at the micron size, to name but a few. I have yet to find a Baxter book I didn’t enjoy. I would have to place him as my second favourite author…………..can you guess who’s first?

The Gap into Conflict by Stephen Donaldson. This, of course, represents the whole Gap series. Having read “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” and being very impressed by a fantasy that didn’t obviously rip off the Lord of the Rings I think Donaldson made an exceptional debut in scfi. He has since chosen to revisit Thomas Covenant but hopefully he may write some more scfi in the future.

The Silkie by A E Van Vogt. This I’ve had for a long time so it must have something going for it. If I remember correctly it’s about genetically modified humans. I don’t know if I’ve read any more of his books and certainly can’t name any. This obviously needs more investigation

So there you go, hardest bit of work I’ve done all week!

Sláinte

Best regards

Phil Middleton
Purchasing and Logistics Manager

Parasite Blurb

Posted on by Neal Asher

Thanks Stu for the slightly altered cover here (which needs a bit sliced off the top). Will get round to a contents list at some point.

The Parasite on Kindle.

After mining complex ices deep in the Solar System, Jack Smith is concerned about his profit margin, but is it him who doesn’t want to face quarantine or something squirming inside him? The Cryon Corporation Director, Geoffry Haven, is also concerned about the bottom line and might consider Jack an expense he can no longer afford, though perhaps suitable for a starring role in a snuff movie. Meanwhile, the human and unhuman agents of World Health must investigate. Perhaps it’s time to deploy vat-grown killers and an anti-photon weapon, because the parasite is coming to Earth, and it’s hungry.

The Parasite was first published by Tanjen Ltd as an illustrated novella back in 1996. Tanjen closed down a number of years later and since then the novella has been difficult if not impossible to obtain. There are copies out there, but checking recently I haven’t seen one for below $50.00, which is a hell of a lot for something only 130 pages long and perhaps only for completists. I’ve edited it again, though I haven’t been too heavy-handed since I didn’t want to deliver something that had completely ceased to be the original. This is my first attempt at self-publishing through Amazon Kindle. I hope you all enjoy it!
– Neal Asher

“Once again, Neal Asher gives his reader a meal of such exquisite taste that you’re left like Oliver, desiring more.” – Authortrek

The Parasite Kindle.

Posted on by Neal Asher

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.

The Parasite on Kindle

Posted on by Neal Asher

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.

Calling Kindle Owners

Posted on by Neal Asher

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…

Last Argument of Kings — Joe Abercrombie

Posted on by Neal Asher
This was a hugely enjoyable completion to the trilogy. What else is there to say? Okay: great characters I really cared about, pain that really hurt, the dirt blood and reality of battles in which people are hacking at each other with effing great meat cleavers and, very very loosely paraphrasing Arthur C Clarke, magic with the drawbacks of technology, especially the kind of technology that appeared at the end of the cold war and has haunted us ever since. I also have to acknowledge wry hat-tips here, and in the other books, to various, ahem, famous speeches and scenes both in reality and fiction. Immediately springing to mind from the last book are The Caves of Moria, whilst in this one we have Churchill… And for me, it’s been wonderful to discover that I still like fantasy, or rather, I like fantasy that’s done well. Nice one Mr Abercrombie.  

Scorpion Histogram

Posted on by Neal Asher

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