Patrick O'Duffy's Blog, page 24

Five days later

So it’s been a pretty exhausting week, guys. I don’t know whether it’s my workload at the day job, the usual mild case of seasonal affective disorder I get during the Melbourne winter, or the effort of publishing and promoting a new novella that’s done it, but I’m plumb tuckered out.

…yeah. Let’s be honest, it’s mostly that last one.

The Obituarist has been out in the wild for five days, and I’m pretty damn happy with how things are going. I’ve sold 30 copies so far through Amazon and Smashwords, which is a pretty good launch. More importantly, the feedback I’m getting from readers is uniformly positive – people are reading it and they are liking it a hell of a lot. Two thumbs up.

For my part, the last few days have been all about the book pimping. I’ve sent out emails and free copies, contacted readers and writers, updated the cover art (now much more effective in greyscale) and tweeted like my life depended on it. Which, hmm, could be an interesting plot point for a future sequel to the novella.

That’s been the other recurring theme in the feedback – readers want to see more of Kendall Barber and his adventures. Well, I’ve got the ideas, I just need to justify the work – if I sell enough copies, a sequel could be on the cards. Ah, who am I kidding – I’ve already plotted out half the book! It has [CENSORED] and [CENSORED] and Kendall is hired to [CENSORED] but has his [CENSORED] [CENSORED] in the process. It’s a pretty hardcore scene, that one!

Anyway, book promotion. I’ve been pretty lackadaisical with this in the past, and the sales of Hotel Flamingo and Godheads are testimony to that. I had a bit of a psychological hangup with those books, because they were largely written years before they were published – in my head they were old news, and promoting them seemed too much like reading the same edition of the newspaper over and over again, trapped in some kind of bookpimp Groundhog Day.

But not this time – this is all new and I am charged up! To the point where I know it’s going to be tiring and eventually irritating to my regular readers to see me constantly flogging the bloody book. So I’m not going to make any more posts like this one – when I talk about The Obituarist here again it’ll be to discuss ideas, process, new developments and stuff that’s actually interesting, rather than just snake oil.

That said, if I can squeeze in a little more snake oil (tastes great, less filling!), I just need to reiterate that I need your help if the book is going to succeed. Recommend it to your friends, family and colleagues (if you think they’d like it) and on any online forums you frequent. Leave reviews at Amazon, Smashwords or Goodreads, or better yet all three. Tell me about places that I can send review copies, or other crime writers that might like to check it out. And above all else, talk about it on social media, The Obituarist’s natural habitat.

Pimp me. Pimp my book.

Okay, you know what? I’m retiring the word ‘pimp’ now as well.

So. Let’s move on.

Next week – something different! I don’t know what! Blogging without a net or pants!

Now on sale – The Obituarist

Friends, fans, old readers and new, the 1st of May 2012 is a pretty big day for me.

Because today I’m pleased beyond all measure to announce that my new e-novella, The Obituarist, is not only finished but published and available to purchase!

Kendall Barber calls himself an obituarist – a social media undertaker who settles accounts for the dead. If you need your loved one’s Facebook account closed down or one last tweet to be made, he’ll take care of it, while also making sure that identity thieves can’t access forgotten personal data. It’s his way of making amends for his past, a path that has seen him return to the seedy city of Port Virtue after years in exile.

But now his past is reaching out to catch up with him, just as he gets in over his head with a beautiful new client whose dead brother may have been murdered – if he’s even dead at all. If Kendall doesn’t play his cards right, he could wind up just as deceased as the usual subjects of his work.

On the other hand, Kendall may know more about what cards to play than anyone else realises…

–

It’s been six months since I announced the concept and started work on this book, two months since I rolled up my sleeves and started it in earnest. It’s been drafted and redrafted, edited and altered, changed and changed back again and now it’s as ready as it’ll ever be.

And I have to say that I had an absolute ball writing this book. Once I really got into it it was a hoot to sit down every night and lay down another chapter of weird crime antics, chase scenes, thoughts about death and identity and occasional jokes. That joy is a bit unusual for me – too often I find writing a chore – and I really hope this isn’t the last time I feel it. Or the last time I write about these characters.

I’d like to thank my wife Nichole for her thoughts and support, my Alpha Readers (Cam Rogers, Josh Kinal and Lyndal McIlwaine) for their feedback and suggestions, Fiona Regan for editing the manuscript and Carla McKee for her great cover. And I’d like to thank you guys, my readers, for responding positively to the idea and telling me you wanted to see more. Here it is – hope you like it.

The Obituarist can be purchased as a $2.99 ebook from the following sites:

The Amazon Kindle Store has the Kindle version
Smashwords has ePub, Kindle, PDF, HTML and Word versions
Other sites (Barnes and Noble, iBooks etc) will have it eventually, and I’ll update as the links go live

All sites should have a sample of the novella that you can read for free.

As part of the launch, I’ve also made some changes to this site, specifically breaking out my ebooks into their own separate pages – so if you want to tell your friends about The Obituarist, link to this page right here. (I’ve also made new pages for Hotel Flamingo and Godheads if you want to spread the love.)

–

And speaking of telling your friends…

Folks, if you want to help me get the word out about The Obituarist, that would be fantastic. Amazing. Vitally necessary, in fact. I’m going to do everything I can to promote the book, but I need all the help I can get and you can provide some with very little effort. Here’s what you can do:

Buy it. Buy it from whatever site and in whatever format you prefer. Even if you’re not really into crime stories, it’s still worth picking it up – it’s offbeat enough that I think anyone who likes my other work will dig this too.
Read it right away. You know how sometimes you buy an ebook and it languishes unread for ages? Jump in and read this one as soon as possible, so that you can then…
Talk about it. Recommend it to your friends, family or anyone that might like it. Mention it on social media. Tweet that you’re halfway through it. Show people the cover on Facebook. Mention it at work when someone asks what you’re reading. Use jungle drums, anything.
Write a review. Give it some love on Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads, any other review site you frequent. Give it stars if that’s a thing, but if you can write a few words about it that would be much better. And be honest – I’d rather see a genuine 3-star review than a fake 5-star review. Mind you, I’d especially rather see genuine 5-star reviews if they’re available.
Pass on the signal. I’ll be promoting this as best I can wherever I can – Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, anywhere else. If you see any of that promotion, pass it along – retweet it, link it, like it, +1 it or whatever. And if you see other people talking about the book, throw up a flag for that too, if only so that I hear about it.
Give me a soapbox. If you’re got a blog, a column, a podcast or some other project of your own, I would love to be on it and have a chance to talk about the novella. I can talk about other stuff too – I’m a charming guest and I bring enough beer for everyone. Try me!

Above all else, tell me what you think of it. I want to hear if you liked it and what you liked about it, and whether you’d be interested in reading a sequel. Because I have ideas for more stories about Kendall and Port Virtue, but if no-one wants to read them then I’ll put them aside and work on something else. And I also want to hear from you if you didn’t like The Obituarist, because I’d like to know why and I’d like the next book to be better.

I always want the next book to be better. That’s how I know I’m not dead yet.

–

Alright, that’s enough out of me. Time to get off the stage and let the book do the talking for a while.

Happy May 1st, gang. Here’s hoping it’s a good month.

Emerge, learn, transform and roll out

May is nearly upon us, and that means the Emerging Writers’ Festival is again on the horizon!

And once again I’m involved not just as a punter but as a contributor. This time around it’s a really exciting role – I’ll be one of the hosts of the Rabbit Hole event. This is an orchestrated writing push where those involved do their level best to get down 30 000 words in just three days.

Cah-razy!

[image error]There are four teams of up to 20 participants, each led by a coach/cheerleader/host. In Victoria this is the redoubtable Jason Nahrung, in Brisbane it’s the undeniable Peter Ball, in Tasmania it’s the noncanonical Rachel Edwards… and in the rest of the country/world/internet it’s yours truly!

What do I know about pumping out 30k in three days? Well, I’ve got a fair amount of experience in grinding the wordcount from my RPG writing days, where I’d madly lay down 20 000 words in a weekend without stopping to eat or sleep or take in any sustenance other than stimulants. But I’ve also got a lot of experience in dicking around and not writing a goddamn thing, which has its own value – the best teachers are either those who can get things done or know exactly why they can’t/don’t get things done. And I can dish it out from both ends, which looks dirty now that I’ve typed it.

Anyway, I won’t talk too much about this here – part of my involvement is working on blogs and chats about it that get the participants all fired up, so I’ll let you know where to look for that when it’s up.

This event aside, there are a lot of great panels and projects in play at the EWF, as well as a great line-up of new and established writers who are looking to share their knowledge and help their peers. If you’re in Melbourne and have any interest in putting your work out there, this festival is a must.

Check it out and get involved!

Defending the indefensible – let’s talk about adverbs

It’s been ages since I talked about the craft of writing, isn’t it? For months it’s all been about publishing and reading habits and how I’m slaving away on The Obituarist – due out next week, fingers crossed! – and no discussion of the nuts and bolts of writing.

I like talking about that stuff, and I hope other people like reading about it, so I’m going to make an effort to counterbalance the relentless self-promotion and introspective musings with some more thinking about the components of writing. Starting today.

(I’ll also make more of an effort to get back into the Thursday-Sunday posting schedule. It’s been a busy month.)

So, adverbs – threat or menace?

It’s accepted writing dogma that adverbs are generally not very good things, weak tools that seek to lend colour and detail to actions but instead leave text flabby and flaccid. Strong verbs are the way to go, y’all, strong verbs and vivid dialogue that show rather than tell and illustrate the characters and their actions.

And I pretty much agree with all of that. Adverbs definitely tend to be a hallmark of bad writing, and little turns me off a text like a string of qualifiers, especially in dialogue – the one page of a Harry Potter novel I read had an adverb after every single instance of ‘he/she said’ and I put that book down and never came back to it. Because I’m fucking hardcore, yeah.

But working on The Obituarist, which uses a more direct, conversational voice than something like Hotel Flamingo, has led me to draw upon the dreaded adverbs more than I normally would. And as I’m working through revisions and my editor’s notes, looking for things to cut, I find I’m leaving some of them in there because they serve a purpose; they do something right.

So what are the benefits of throwing an adverb into the mix rather than a verb whose mighty biceps bulge like pregnant anacondas? Well, here are a few.

Information density

Here’s the thing about ‘show, don’t tell’ – it takes more wordcount to show. And while usually you go fuck it, pile those letters on, sometimes you want to control the length of a story, maybe for a competition or because you set yourself an artificial threshold for your novella and its tiny little chapters. So you look ways to show without being boring about it, and if you want to pack data into the smallest possible space, adverbs can make a real difference. I could spend 100 words showing you how outrage and food poisoning combine to drive a character’s actions and interactions, or I can say ‘he vomited angrily on her shoes’ and let two words convey pretty much the same information. Which is tempting, ‘cos I’m tired. And on that note…

They make the reader do the heavy lifting

God, readers are lazy fuckers sometimes. They’re all like MAKE ME A MOVIE THAT PLAYS OUT IN MY HEAD MISTER WRITER MAN when all I want to do is drink stout and go to sleep. Make your own goddamn movie, or at least help me out with the soundtrack and special effects. Adverbs are the director’s tools rather than the scriptwriter’s, and used properly they direct the reader to put their own spin on an action, to visualise it in a way that makes sense to them. And if different readers play that out different ways in their mind’s eyes, that’s a good thing. Everyone gets a different movie! And if you end up watching Catwoman that’s your fault, not mine.

[image error]

Filtering through POV

I kind of have a stick up my arse about strictly following POV – if a book or scene is seen through one character’s perspective (be it 1st or 3rd person), then by Christ it stays wedded to that perspective and never looks inside someone else’s skull or I WILL CUT YOU. Or at least mentally edit your work. Adverbs push meaning to the surface by tying it not just to characters’ actions, but to an external assessment of those actions made by the POV character. Don’t tell me that character #2 is upset, tell me how character #1 interprets her actions as ‘visibly struggling’; that keeps me centred in the right place. And hey, if the POV character turns out to be wrong about those interpretations, that just means the narrator didn’t realise they were unreliable – that’s right, mofos, adverbs be postmodern n’ shit.

When verbs can’t do it alone

‘He ran half-heartedly after her’ is something very different from ‘he walked/jogged/ambled/macarenaed after her’ because it adds an emotional component to the physical, it adds meaning to the movement; it throws the verb into a whole new light that makes you interpret it completely differently. If we were German we’d probably have a word that means exactly this, and it would be a little bit creepy that it happened often enough to be hardwired into our language, but instead we speak English and we have a vast buzzing swarm of qualifiers that allow us to undercut, deconstruct or completely reverse the meaning of our verbs in exciting and unpredicable ways.

Adjectives need love too

To be honest I tend to slap adverbs onto adjectives more than I do verbs. Probably because adjectives annoy me; they just sit there, static, defining a noun that isn’t in motion. Verbs are more exciting, and adding an adverb to an adjective implies a verb that just happened or could happen or that got us to the point where we’re looking at this noun now. Smell the excitement. I especially like incongruous pairings like ‘suddenly-moist’, ‘brazenly chaste’ or ‘grotesquely beautiful’ that set the reader a puzzle they have to pull apart to understand and that cause me to ignore the standard rule that you don’t stick a hyphen after an ‘-ly’ qualifier.

Having said all that, I’m still pretty harsh on adverbs. If all they do is emphasise things – like the ‘pretty’ in that last sentence, or the dozens that litter this post – then they’re up for culling in any MS I edit (and should be in any I write, if I’m disciplined, which I ain’t). But by giving writers a way to recontextualise actions and details, by making stories something that needs a little more thought to unpack, they have can have real power. We can only pray that we use that power wisely SEE WHAT I DID THERE.

…man, I really have to get out of this sudden all-caps habit.

So anyway, what are your thoughts on adverbs? Devil’s tools or wordage of the gods? And would you like to see more posts like this, or should I focus more on rants and relentless self-promotion? (There’ll be more of that next week, never fear.) Leave a comment or six and let me know.

Priorities

A very short blog update

I finished the draft of The Obituarist.

I feel that this gives me the right to slack off, hang out and play Mass Effect 3 for the rest of the day, rather than writing any more about anything.

Will be back in a few days.

And on the third day he blogged again in accordance with the Scriptures

***insert gross sneezing noises***

Oh, hello there. Don't mind me, I'm just plague-ridden and exhausted. You know, when I was younger (and not that much younger either) I'd use the Easter weekend as a chance to party as hard as I possibly could and hit up a string of raves, festivals, house parties and BBQs before collapsing on Monday and sleeping for 20 hours.

Now, at age 41, I've spent the four-day weekend writing, cleaning and sniffling. Goodbye, rock and roll.

But hey, I'm getting stuff done, which is good. The Obituarist continues apace and I'm on target to finish this draft by next weekend, at which point it goes out to the editor and for feedback from my readers. Plus I have a line on a designer to approach regarding the cover, which I'll do during the review/editing window. All of which makes me feel super-organised and not at all like a shut-in drinking bad coffee and wearing trackpants all day.

I've also been out to some Comedy Festival shows; you can see my reviews of Tessa Waters, Dingo & Wolf and Daniel Burt on The Pun, along with reviews of many other shows. I also saw Damian Callinan, who was terrific, and would recommend The Peer Revue except that it's already finished its run.

–

I don't have much else to talk about at the moment, but rather than cut things short right there, I wanted to drop a few links to other blogs, events and postings that are worth your time and eyeballs.

Cat Valente posted this amazing essay about reactions to Christopher Priest's criticism of this year's Clarke Award nominees and how different (and loathsome) those reactions might have been if a woman had written the exact same thing. It's a fantastic post that uses a lot of genuine examples of the negative reactions women draw just from being female on the Internet, so naturally a bunch of the comments are that she's wrong and that never happens and men have it just as hard and YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID 'COS BITCHES AIN'T SHIT and so forth. But not that many of the comments, thankfully. Anyway, it's a really strong piece and I think it's worth reading and considering even if you disagree with her premise or conclusions.
Kirstyn McDermott has written a piece in partial response to Cat Valente's essay that is also well worth a read, where she talks about her own experiences of feminism and internet responses to women with opinions.
And speaking of blogging about feminism and writing, Foz Meadows continues to impress with her essays, including this pair about default narrative sexism in fantasy worlds and how that then interacts with sexism within wider geek circles.
Former Queenslander Jason Nahrung vents some spleen over the axing of the QLD Premier's Literary Awards – not the worst thing Campbell Newman will probably do to my former home, but certainly one a lot of writers find immediately upsetting. Jason also has some good news, though, in that a group of writers, booksellers and artslovers are trying to get an alternative set of awards up and running – more info here.
Like many others, Jay Kristoff saw The Hunger Games recently (I haven't, but I've got to be different), and he has some thoughts on the rating it received and how we look at sex and violence in stories for/about teenagers. Jay also thinks a lot about steampunk – not surprising, given the nature of his soon-to-be-released novel Stormdancer – and has put down some interesting thoughts about the evolution of the subgenre over at the blog Steamed.
Alan Baxter is also talking about The Hunger Games (jeez, I'm really falling behind here), in this case the novel and what he sees as flaws in both the story and the way some adults think about YA fiction. Alan also has a new e-novella out called The Darkest Shade of Grey , which you should all investigate and perhaps buy for the low price of $1.99.
And another thing Alan is involved with is Thirteen O'Clock, a new collaborative blog about horror news and reviews. He and fellow editors/writers Felicity Dowker and Andrew McKiernan are doing their best to cover a lot of new and independent books and projects, from both Australia and overseas, and if you're interested in horror fiction it's well worth a look.
News out this week is a set of Gallup survey stats showing that people are actually reading far more now – and reading more books at that – than they did 25 or 50 years ago. Which gives me hope.
And in closing, Text From Dog wins the entire Internet.

Alright, that's enough out of me for the night. Next update should hopefully just say FINISHED in eleventy-hundred-point type above a picture of a coffin.

I just flew in from New Zealand and boy are my arms tired

Hiya folks,

I'm back from New Zealand! It was a very busy business trip that involved stops in Auckland and Wellington, long drives on both windy mountain roads and endless grubby motorways and many, many meetings with teachers and authors. It was really productive, and it's going to have a significant effect on what I do for my day job over the next year or two.

Which, of course, isn't what this blog is about. So let's move on.

The downside of spending all week working is that I had very little time or energy to work on The Obituarist, and as a result the release date on that is going to slip. With the other things I have to do this month – more on that in a bit – I'm just not going to have time to do more than a chapter a night, and this draft is still only at the halfway mark, so I need another two weeks minimum to finish it and then at least two more weeks to get it edited and take in comments from my crack team of Alpha Readers. So it's looking like the end of April (if not later) before it's ready for release.

Am I making excuses for myself? Um. Maybe a bit, yeah. If I really, really knuckled down on this book and did nothing else in my free time I could get it ready sooner. But I don't want to do that, because it wouldn't be much fun and because I don't think the book would benefit by being rushed like that. Still, I should be trying to turn this around faster, and I will do what I can to speed things up, such as focusing on it over the 4-day Easter weekend. And getting a cover organised sooner rather than later.

–

So what am I doing this month? Going to the Comedy Festival, naturally. Not just because I like going out and laughing at things that are funny, although that's a super-huge part of it. But I'll also be writing reviews for The Pun – half-a-dozen shows at this point, and possibly more as time goes on. I'll link to URLs once they're written and up, which will be of little interest to readers outside Melbourne, I know.

 

I like writing reviews because it gets me out of my comfort zone and gets me writing in a different mode, and to a tight wordcount to boot. (I also like the free tickets, let's be honest.) However, while in previous years I've also written mini-reviews of every show I've seen and posted them to LiveJournal, this year I'll probably confine myself just to the Pun pieces. That's partly so I can keep focused on The Obituarist – see, work ethic! – but also because of some conversations I had last year about reviewing and about comedy. There's a critical vocabulary about comedy and its construction that I don't as yet fully understand, and until I can really pull apart and analyse an act in depth, I think I'd provide a better service by writing a small number of reviews and giving each of them full attention than a large number of weaker reviews.

Gosh, so serious.

Plus, you know, I'll be going to shows a lot because N. works at the Festival and I want to see my wife. She's lovely.

–

The other thing that happened in NZ was that I got to give my new Kindle a heavy workout, burning through a large number of ebooks on flights and long car rides. That was excellent for a number of reasons, in particular the chance to see how different authors and publishers format ebooks and the way they use headings, different font sizes, bookmarks and other tools to make a more easily/usefully navigable text.

I also saw how easy it is for odd formatting errors and hiccups to creep into even the most professional of ebooks – blocks of text in the wrong font, strange indents, italics being interpreted as headings rather than emphasis and lots of other artefacts of the conversion process that sneak through because someone hasn't gone through the finished file line by line. (Which, incidentally, would be easier if Kindle Store authors got free access to download their own titles rather than having to pay for them.)

So anyway, what I'm getting at is that as part of publishing The Obituarist, I'll be doing heavy passes through all my existing ebooks (both on the Kindle Store and Smashwords) and more than likely uploading new versions of all of them that improve the layout and correct any formatting errors. Which will give me something to do while my readers kick the shit out of this draft.

–

Now, off to have a drink and see a show! And then to come home and finish another chapter.

Nose to the grindstone. Nose or arse. My promise to you.

Not judging a cover by its book

I want to talk tonight about what I liked about a book I didn't like.

…okay, that intro could have been clearer.

Last month I decided to check out some books published by Angry Robot Books, which are putting more and more SF/F/H books out these days. I didn't really care what I read; my main interest was seeing what the standard of editing and typesetting were in their books. Which is normal, right? Plenty of you just grab books at random from library shelves because you want to check on the level of skill and care taken in their production, right?

Right.

Anyway, I looked at Angry Robot's Wikipedia page and grabbed the first novel by the second author listed (after Dan Abnett, as I'd already tried and quickly cast aside his Triumff.) This was Guy Adams' The World House, and frankly it's not very good. It has a decent premise (there's a surreal and spooky house inside a box and shit's going down) that's let down by pedestrian writing and clichéd characters and dialogue. (As for the typesetting and editing, there were a few glaring errors but on the whole it was acceptable.)

But I don't want to get into that; others may get more out of the book than I did, and anyway I don't want to use this blog to talk about negative things. Instead I want to talk about what was terrific about The World House, and that is its cover, which is fucking boss.

Let's start with the front image:

Really strong sense of design here that makes the most of a stark black-and-white palette for maximum contrast. Bang – title. Bang – spooky house. Bang – author name. Lots of hard lines and blocks with occasional curves to break things up. And then you've got that single spot of red in the window that pulls in your eye and tells you that something important is up in that room. Add in the intro sentence at the top and the whole point and premise of the book is spelled out to immediately grab your interest. Personally I wouldn't have bothered with the moth and the pull quote from Kilworth, but then again I'm not a professional designer and they're more likely to be write about this than I am.

So that's a really strong front cover that stands out in a shop or in a set of Amazon listings, and that's a hugely important thing. For a lot of publishers that would be enough. But Angry Robot really went the extra mile with an amazing back cover:

(Sorry about the drop in quality; I had to scan it myself because no-one bothers showing the back cover of books online.)

Let's look at each part in turn:

Blurb: Short and simple, this fleshes out the promise of the front cover with the first line in red to immediately tell you what's important – there's a 'they', they've been around for a long time, and you can bet that they're bad guys. The rest of the blurb tells you that weird shit is in this house, and bad stuff, and a prisoner and that all of that is important. I personally think there should be more in the blurb about the characters of the novel to make it clear that the narrative involves people doing things in this weird environment, but at the same time it needs to stay short so this is probably okay.
FILE UNDER: This box in the top right tells us right away that the book is MODERN FANTASY and gives us a handy précis of plot points – 'worlds within worlds/ a sinister prisoner/ dimensional mayhem/ break out!' No spoilers being handed out, but if you want to know if the book has the kind of story elements you like, or you can't spare an additional 20 seconds to read the blurb, that box tells you everything important about the book in 14 words.
Pull quotes: I'm not terribly impressed by the opinions of Mark Chadbourn or Christopher Folwer, to be honest, and I don't even know who Stephen Volk is. But I'm not the sole target audience, and it's not like many readers drop a book just because they don't like another author who liked it. For those who do like these authors, it's a drawcard, and if you don't know the authors, you still get the impression that people who probably know lots about MODERN FANTASY liked this book and think you will too. It's win-win. Also, the use of red for the quotes and black for the attribution keeps the contrast flowing on the cover, quickly drawing your eye from the slugline at the top to the recommendations and then letting you drift back to the blurb proper.
IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY: Now this is clever, because they start off by recommending three books that aren't published by Angry Robot. None of them are new books, either – Simulacron-3 (1964), Otherland (1996) and Weaveworld (1987). By suggesting these, Angry Robot potentially help newer readers learn more about some of the history and significant texts of the genre/subgenre, which is a really cool thing and worth pursuing. They also aren't diluting their own brand by pushing readers towards competing modern titles.
OR ANOTHER ONE OF OURS: These, of course, are the modern titles Angry Robot want you to buy, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's smart to just show the covers with no additional info, because it stops the cover from getting too cluttered and because we can assume that if those books are shown then they're probably in the same subgenre or ballpark as this one. I also think that it's smart to use covers that are primarily black and/or red, so that they align with the design and colour palette of the rest of the cover.
MORE?: Last, it's important to have a URL on the back of the book, of course. It's even more important to have a URL that still works and that doesn't redirect you to a Harper Collin site that has nothing to do with this site or with Angry Robot, but I'm sure it worked when the book was printed and time marches on. It's also good to have that note that the book is available as an ebook, because the only way someone will see the back cover is if they have the book in their hand in a shop or library; knowing that there's a digital version may be enough to sway a Kindle owner to buy it that way if they're not sold on the hardcopy.

Wow, this turned into another long post. Why am I incapable of using fewer than 1000 words to say I liked something?

Anyhoo, I don't really want this post to foster discussion about either The World House or Angry Robot. I didn't like this book, sure, but I'm looking forward to Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds (which also has an amazing cover) and I've been hearing great and intriguing things about Adam Christopher's Empire State (ditto) which are both from this publisher.

A completely unrelated angry robot

What I'd rather talk about is what you think of this cover design, front and back. What do you think works? What doesn't? What would you do differently? What are some cover designs – especially back cover designs – that have grabbed your interest and packaged information in a really effective way?

And, most of all, what are some ways that ebook authors/publishers, who don't have the luxury of a back cover, can format and deliver this kind of information without just dropping a bunch of text onto a title's Kindle Store page that no-one will see because they don't scroll down far enough?

(PS – if you're Guy Adams and you stumble across this entry, sorry to be a douche about your book. Feel free to be a douche about one of mine in return.)

Fill me up, Buttercup

Holla folks,

It's just going to be a quick post tonight, as I have something else to focus on. I've put myself on a tight schedule of banging out one chapter of The Obituarist a night, or at least nearly every night, and so far it's going pretty well. Admittedly each chapter is only around 1200 words, but hey, it still means I'm getting it done. And having fun with it too, which is pretty unusual for me. So fingers crossed, I should have this draft finished pretty soon and a final, publishable version by early-mid April.

But that does kinda preclude making too many long blog posts, just for the moment.

–

However, other than blowing my own trumpet about my sudden discovery of a work ethic, I did want to post something else.

As I mentioned on the weekend, I haz a Kindle! And I'm going to New Zealand next week! And it seems to me that I can combine these two facts and end up with plenty to read on flights and long drives without blowing out my luggage allowance.

But finding ebooks is harder than I had originally thought – or, more to the point, finding ones I want to read in the endless ocean of ebooks that gnaws at the shores of the Kindle Store. There's a blog post percolating in my skull about that, but that's a topic for another night.

Tonight, instead, I'm hoping you can help a brother out with some recommendations. What are your favourite 2-3 ebooks that come in Kindle format (whether from Amazon or another vendor) that cost 5 dollars or less? (I'm happy to spend more than five bucks on an ebook, but just not this week 'cos funds are tight.) Tell me what I should buy – and why I should buy it.

Comments! I need comments! Lickety-split! Fill up my Kindlator!

One of the cool kids

So I turned 41 on Friday.

Thank you, thank you, yes I don't look a day over 33, you're too kind.

It was a day marked by spontaneous outpourings of love and respect from people all over the planet, which is amazing and always makes me feel humbled and incredibly fortunate.

PLUS I GOT PHAT LOOTS.

Said loots include an excellent and stylish watch, books, a Lego Batplane set (!!!), a variety of vouchers for buying graphic novels, and…

[image error]

Yes, I done got me a Kindle, thanks to the efforts of my amazing wife and our most excellent friends. And it is a thing of beauty – 155 grams of processing power, with a minimal but easy-to-use interface and enough space to store a metric shit-tonne of ebooks.

I have, of course, immediately put all my own ebook titles on it, and have finally been able to examine them in their native environment and realise that I don't like some of the formatting. So I'll need to do some work on those – both Kindle Store and Smashwords versions – to get them up to snuff.

I also have a few other titles on there, including Chuck Wendig's Shotgun Gravy and Greg Stolze's Switchflipped, both of which I can now read in comfort without balancing a laptop on my knees while riding the bus. More will come, once I start working out how to filter down the impossible volume of ebooks on the market to find the ones I want.

Yes, I'm now a consumer as well as a producer, and can start developing my own impressions about ebooks and how expensive they are. It's exciting.

–

Also rather exciting is the appearance of Hotel Flamingo and Godheads in The Book Designer's ebook cover design awards for February. They didn't win, but I'm assuming that the covers are listed in descending order of awesomeness, which means they placed pretty high. I'm chuffed no matter what.

Speaking of cover designs, I'm still working out what to do for The Obituarist; I'm very happy with the great work Design Junkies did on those two books, but it'd be good to try something different for the next one. So if there are any graphic designers reading who'd like to work on an ebook cover – and can work within my budgetary constraints – drop me a line and talk to me!

(As for Nine Flash Nine, I'm talking to an illustrator about that one for something different again, but it's a while away still.)

–

Work on The Obituarist continues apace. I'm actually having a lot of fun writing it, which is very out of character for me, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

The problem has been finding time to write it, as this has been a very busy couple of months, what with the day job, social life, travelling and writing horse-choking blog posts every 3-4 days. Which, as you may have noticed, I'm cutting back on a little, now that all that book pricing stuff is done and dusted.

But still, the hope is that I can finish a first draft by the end of March. I'm actually going to New Zealand in a week or so to spend 5 days travelling around the North Island and meeting with textbook authors and consultants for my day job. But by night, I plan to eschew the fleshpots of Auckland and Palmerston North to hunker down in my hotel room and bang out one 1000-word chapter after another.

Let's see how that goes.

–

In closing – it's a short post tonight – I want to reiterate the fact that my wife is amazing. Just amazing.

She's my sunshine, you know.

Also, LEGO BATPLANE.