Iain Rowan's Blog, page 10

infinity plus singles

infinity plus are now established as an ebook publisher of a wide range of high quality fiction from a diverse and interesting set of authors (and, uh, me: declaration of interest here: both Nowhere To Go and One Step Closer are published by IP too).

They've now released the first of a range of bite-sized ebooks with gorgeous cover art, short stories that can be read in a single setting, cheap and accessible samples that might provide an introduction to the work of a particular writer. Dip in, try a couple, and see what you like.

The line-up of initial releases looks like this:

One Step Closer (singles #1) by Iain Rowan
Has Anyone Here Seen Kristie? (singles #2) by John Grant
The Time-Lapsed Man (singles #3) by Eric Brown
Head Shots (singles #4) by Keith Brooke
Old Soldiers (singles #5) by Kit Reed

But infinity plus have stories lined up from Lisa Tuttle, Sarah Ash, Neil Williamson and Anna Tambour, as well as the authors listed above and a growing list of others. Check out all of the details at the infinity plus website.http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/books/

First Time Buyers

An excellent and unnerving story from James Everington's very good collection The Other Room, available free as a Halloween treat. Check it out.

Then draw the curtains.

The October Country

My favourite time of year is coming. I can smell it.

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photo thanks to Quapan

Cool, clear mornings, the night stealing in darker by minutes every evening, the first low, hanging mist, grass starry with dew and the promise of frosts to come, the smell of autumn in the air, warm yellow lights on in the windows of dark houses, the leaves spinning round and round and down, halloween and the gunpowder stink of fireworks and the woodsmoke stink of bonfires and the the not very hidden child inside kicking through piles of leaves and relishing the run up to birthday and Christmas, the expectation always the best part because expectation always turns out to be better than the thing itself.

"That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain." (Ray Bradbury)

Fruit loops

This is about a week out of date, but what the hell. I like a lot of the products that Apple make. I'm typing this on a battered Macbook, with one of the command keys not working due to the introduction of the tea virus, and various bits of plastic chipped off the body. Before that it was an ibook, that worked for years and I passed it on and it worked for years more until I was helpfully moving it and dropped it (less six inches, and it died...my daughter dropped it down an entire flight of stairs and it was fine). My next computer will probably be a mac. I rarely go out without my little ipod in my pocket, and although I don't own one, the phones and ipads are shiny too, and look fun.

Steve Jobs was a clever businessman with a single-minded vision, and I admire him very much for his insistence that things should look good, as well as work well, a piece of simple design philosophy that had somehow managed to bypass pretty much the entire tech sector. He sounded like quite a tosser as a person, but I didn't know him, so that's just based on other people's stories. His company makes nice stuff. His other company have made some excellent films.

But I did see the commotion around the time of his death, and it was interesting because I was wrapped up in my own thoughts about such things too. The sight of people holding candlelit vigils outside Apple stores (did I really just type that?) reminded me of something that stuck in my mind after the surreal paroxysm of faux-grief that gripped much of the UK at the time of Diana's death. It was a story from a girl, whose close friend had travelled to London to be there for the funeral, and to lay flowers out on the street. The girl telling the story had lost her father a while earlier, and the 'close' friend had never laid flowers for him, or given any to her, yet embarked on this pilgrimage to do so for someone she only knew through the media. The mourners outside the stores, with their little post-it notes and their candles burning on an iPad screen - an image I honestly thought was from The Onion or the Daily Mash - reminded me of that story.

The free ebook experiment

Not sure it's conclusive yet, but a progress report nonetheless..

On 22nd September, we made One Step Closer, the first story from Nowhere To Go, a free stand-alone ebook as a sampler for the collection. A gateway drug that will draw readers in, give them a taste, and make them crave another hit of short crime fiction. One Step Closer won the Derringer award, is a decent short story, and I think it's reasonably representative of the rest of the stories in the collection. The experiment was to make it free, and see how well it worked as a promo for Nowhere To Go.

In the subsequent three weeks, One Step Closer has been downloaded over 10,000 times from Amazon. It's been the number one free short story across the whole of Amazon UK for just about three weeks solid. I'm surprised and pleased in equal measure.

Impact on sales of the short story collection?

Pretty much zero, to date, but it might be early days, and I don't know how many of those 10,000 copies have been read. Given my suspicions that free stuff gets hoarded, I don't know how many of those 10,000 copies will ever be read. We'll see.

So.

Bernadette Rowan, 10 August 1932-30 September 2011.


May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields.

this

The Shelter by James Everington - Review

When I was growing up, I lived opposite a field with horses in it. In the dragging, oppressive heat of late summer, in the minutes before  a thunderstorm, they'd charge around the field like mad things, breathing hard, eyes wild. They knew the storm was coming.

The first half of The Shelter has that kind of feel. Everington is excellent at evoking a mounting sense of unease, turning to dread, that close, oppressive feeling when everything is still and ordinary, but the whole world is filled with the sense that something huge and terrible is just about to happen. The Shelter is set in late summer, in the heat and boredom of the long school holiday that I can remember from my own childhood, adventures in woods punctuated by occasional casual, random violence of  older kids. A group of teenagers at that confused, angry transition between childhood and an adulthood not yet understood, set out across the fields and woods  to explore an old air-raid shelter. The tension builds and builds, and then terror ensues, and that's the second success of this impressive novella.

Horror fiction often disappoints me, as the suspense and dread rises, but then you see the monster, and...is that it? The terror in The Shelter is mostly unseen, and mostly revealed through the actions of others, and as a result is far more unsettling and interesting. Just enough is explained, and more importantly for me, just enough is not, and all of this happens within a confident and controlled narrative and natural, convincing dialogue.

One of the best things about the growth of the ebook market is that it's far easier for writers to make available stories that might previously have been deemed 'uncommercial' in length, and this is a perfect example. The Shelter can be read in one sitting, which I think is one of the virtues of horror fiction at shorter than novel length, as the atmosphere can be sustained. Don't start it though if you have something to do, as you won't want to stop until you've finished.

Everington's The Other Room was one of the most impressive debut collections that I've read in some time, and The Shelter follows this up and takes it further, and would absolutely not be out of place in any print anthology. Start reading James Everington now, so when he's a star of the genre you can be smug about the fact that you've been reading him from the start.

One Step Closer

We've made One Step Closer, the opening story from Nowhere To Go, free on Amazon from today as a taster for the collection. One Step Closer was first published in Hardluck Stories, and won the Derringer Award for best short story.

It's currently the number one free book in the Kindle short story charts on Amazon UK (eighth in the US), and it's ranked 126 across all free content for Kindle in the UK.

Interesting stuff, but will it draw people into shelling out for the collection? Time will tell.

loss, isolation and other stories

Fantastically generous (and very perceptive) review of Ice Age by David Longhorn, editor of the excellent Supernatural Tales.