Alan Baxter's Blog, page 94

ThrillerCast episodes up

I've been a bit remiss in reminding people about the new episodes of ThrillerCast, the podcast I do with fellow author David Wood. While the podcast is essentially about reading, writing and publishing in the thriller genre, there's a lot of cross-genre talk and all kinds of other interesting stuff. Since I last mentioned it, four new episodes have gone up.

ThrillerCast Episode 5 – Writing a novel

ThrillerCast episode 6 – Writing a thriller, part 2

ThrillerCast episode 7 – The Kent Holloway interview

ThrillerCast Episode 8 – Escapism

You can find all those episodes here: http://www.thrillerpodcast.com/

Next up is a review of Trent Jamieson's debut novel Death Most Definite, followed by an interview with the man himself. Be sure to subscribe via iTunes, then you won't need me to remind you. Which I'm clearly not very good at.

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A Game Of Thrones – George R R Martin

I mentioned before that I was finally reading this massive epic fantasy series by George R R Martin. Basically, I've had the books for ages, buying them because it was something I wanted to read, but putting off the actual reading until the series was finished. I don't like to be left hanging. But now there's going to be an HBO series based on the whole A Song Of Ice And Fire series, so I decided I should start reading. I've just finished the first book, A Game Of Thrones, and Merlin's Cock, is it a fantastic book.

So many people have told me I should read this series and no one I know that has read it thought it was anything less than awesome. I can understand why. The scope of this story redefines the word "epic". It's massive in its ideas, in its cast of characters, in its imagination. You travel through the lives of the key players in a volatile time for this particular kingdom and it's never boring. The political intrigue is fascinating, the races and places are vivid. Seriously, as a writer, this book bemuses me. How Martin is able to create and maintain this world in such detail is mind-blowing. It truly is a masterful achievement.

I had an idea about what this first volume was leading up to, what the basic shape of things at the end would be. I was pretty close to accurate in my prediction, yet Martin still managed to deliver that with a breathtaking clarity and lots of surprises. I can't wait to read on with this series now, even though I know it's not yet concluded. I can understand the masses clamouring for a final volume.

However, in my new determined effort to read more outside my genre, I've promised myself that I'll read one non-genre novel for every genre novel I read. So I've now moved on to Unimagined, by Imran Ahmad. It's the story of a young man from Pakistan and his life growing up as an immigrant in Britain. So far it's excellent. Fundamentally a memoir, it's written with a kind of succinct brevity that makes it hard to put down. I'll report more on that when I'm finished.

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A great review for Xmas

Those lovely people over at Book Lover's Club, a group on Facebook, have reviewed RealmShift. Here's an excerpt:

RealmShift builds pace as the story progresses, rocketing us towards the ultimate showdown, never releasing us from its grip until the climax.

Not only is it thought-provoking in its exploration of religious beliefs, but contains magic, dark humour, action and fight-scenes so intense and so realistic that it would be difficult to find their rival.

For lovers of dark fantasies, thrillers or just a bloody good read, this book comes highly recommended.

Now I'm looking forward to reading its sequel, Mage Sign.

Wow. How cool is that? I'm very happy. The full review is here. If you're a Facebooker, you should click Like on the Book Lover's Club page as they do good stuff over there. There's also going to be a competition coming up, so if you Like the page you'll get notification of that and any future reviews and comps. It's a win-win for everyone.

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Culturomics – 500 billion words start a trend

My brother-in-law sent me this one from the New York Times (thanks Ade!) and it blew me away. I'm guessing that people already know about the controversial project by Google to digitise every book in the world. If you don't, it's easy to find out a bit about it. Just Google it. *sigh*

Now, from that effort, a huge, and I mean monstrously, giganto-huge, database has been made from nearly 5.2 million digitised books. That database is now available to the public for free downloads and online searches. Before you panic that every book ever written is now available for free (which is what a lot of people fear) take a moment to understand the nature of the database. It consists of the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian. That word-mine comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear. The potential use for this in cultural studies and humanities is mind-boggling.

"The goal is to give an 8-year-old the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books," said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He calls this method of mass, high speed analysis "culturomics": the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture.

There are those that have reservations about the efficacy of the project and those that question the team involved, suugesting that not all the right kind of experts are represented. But you always get that among academics. They can be a bitchy bunch.

The New York Times article closes with this gem:

The warehouse of words makes it possible to analyze cultural influences statistically in a way previously not possible. Cultural references tend to appear in print much less frequently than everyday words, said Mr. Michel, whose expertise is in applied math and systems biology. An accurate picture needs a huge sample. Checking if "sasquatch" has infiltrated the culture requires a supply of at least a billion words a year, he said.

Read the whole article for a much clearer idea of what's happening. There are links in the article to the full Science journal paper (available free to everyone, although you have to register) and an online tool to search the Google database for the use of any particular word or phrase over time. I can see myself wasting a lot of time with this.

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Advertising in ebooks – an inevitable outcome

I made a passing comment on Twitter yesterday that led to some heated discussion. My comment was this:

Ebooks will soon carry links, photos, video, etc. They will also, in order to really monetize the medium, contain ads.

Which I followed with this tweet:

Your ebook will start in 60 seconds, after these messages from our sponsors. #wontbelong

Man, that triggered some visceral reactions from a lot of people. Particualy the advertising part. I think multimedia ebooks are inevitable too, but they're already showing up in some guises. It's a matter of ereaders catching up that stands between the standard ebook as it is now and the future ebook full of other media.

But when it comes to advertising in ebooks, I think it's something that people need to accept. There are many reasons, not least the desire to monetize the ebook and keep "cover" prices down. I'm a big fan of ebooks, but I believe they need to be a lot cheaper than print books. I know all about the general production, formatting and so on, but the same applies to print books. The simple fact is that a person doesn't get a physical object and the price needs to reflect that. Also, with ebook retailers, the margins are much wider. I make a bigger royalty on a Kindle version of RealmShift, for example, than I do on a print version, even though the Kindle edition is $2.99 and the print edition $9.99. But it's obviously in everyones interests for publishers to make a healthy profit as well as authors. The more money a publisher has, the more authors they can take on and the more books they can produce. The more authors and books a publisher has on board, the more choice and variety the reading public have. It's a win for everyone. But how to make it happen?

It's a simple fact that we live in a capitalist society. If anything is going to work, someone needs to be making money. Ideally, everyone is making money except the people buying the product, and those people are happy with what they get for their outlay. In that environment, other than producing a quality product, a lot of profit comes from advertising. And is it really so bad to have ads in ebooks?

A lot of people on Twitter yesterday complained about ads interrupting the reading experience. I agree that if ads suddenly popped up when you turned a page, that would piss me off no end. But that's not how it has to work. When you buy a DVD, you put it in and you get some ads and trailers before the film starts and maybe some afterwards as well. The movie experience itself is solid and uninterrupted. I see this as the way forward with ebooks. Hopefully consumer demand will force that to happen. If publishers start putting ads in the middle of books, customers should rightly voice their rage and refuse to buy from the publisher any more. But if you have to flick through a few pages of ads before the start of chapter one, it's a slightly annoying but overall not very debilitating chore. Especially if the presence of those few pages of ads means the ebook is a reasonable price and the author and publisher are making money. Obviously, with the presence of ads, it's the publisher that stands to make the most, but don't forget my point above about publishers with good profit margins taking on more authors and giving readers more books.

I even see a time when an ebook might open with visual or video ads that you have to endure before the book itself starts that aren't just the publisher promoting their other books, but third party advertisers buying space. Imagine an ebook of something by John Grisham, Dan Brown or J K Rowling. These are people that sell a lot of books. If their publisher sold advertising space in the opening pages of their books, that space could be sold at a premium. The publisher could stand to make a lot of money. Hopefully we'd see some of that money given back to authors in higher advances and royalties as well as being invested in future projects. I realise this is something of a utopian view and perhaps rather naive, but we can all dream. If the money is there, we can all lobby to see at least some of it spent right.

With most ereaders now utilising wifi and 3G technology, we could even see a situation where a different set of ads pop up every time you open a book. Ideally you'd only ever see ads at the start of the book, but if the advertising code used the wireless networks you might decide to reread a book a year later and see entirely new ads at the start. We're already seeing video games where the billboards are updated with current advertising in-game. It's no great stretch to see that happen with ebooks, thereby making that advertising space more profitable. Someone on Twitter (@NomentionofKev) even mentioned that the ereaders themselves might carry the ads, not the books. That risks a situation where every time you turn on the reader, you see an ad. For me, that's going too far and I'd avoid that kind of reader. But it's quite possible that we'll see that situation before long.

Someone else (@Cacotopos) said that they have a demand list for ebooks – 1) no DRM 2) .ePub 3) no intertextual ads. And they noted that price wasn't even on their list yet. I tend to agree with their list, but I would definitely add 4) Never more than $5 RRP.

Advertising annoys all of us, but it's a necessary evil in a capitalist society. Sure, it would be great to have an ebook with no advertising, but isn't it better to suffer a bit of advertising and have more choice of books, more new authors given a chance to get their work out to wide audiences and cheaper ebook purchase prices? I'm convinced that ads in ebooks are inevitable. It's down to us to think about that and start voicing our opinions now so that we can hopefully help to shape the way that advertising is approached from the outset.

What are you thoughts on the matter?

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52 Stitches in memoriam for Jamie Eyberg

This is a bittersweet moment for me. On the one hand, it's excellent that this new anthology is now available. On the other, it's a sad reminder of the death of Jamie Eyberg and his wife, Ann. All proceeds from the sales of this book will go into a fund for Jamie and Ann's children, Kennedy and Brendan.

Jamie Eyberg wasn't someone I knew personally, but we'd crossed paths many times online. He was a decent bloke and a good writer. In August this year Jamie and Ann were killed in an accident near their acreage home in Coon Rapids, USA. Jamie was 36, Ann was 34. So buying this book is not only going to score you an anthology of great horror fiction, but it will go towards directly improving the lives of Kennedy and Brendan, who both have a hell of a lot to deal with.

But onto the book. It's the brainchild of Aaron Polson, another top bloke and great writer. He runs the 52 Stitches website where a new piece of horror flash fiction is published every week. Each year, those 52 short stories are collected into an anthology, this being the second volume in the series. My story, Jeff Newman's Headaches, is included in this one.

You can get the book from Amazon. Also, check out the other books available from Strange Publications. Think about who might like this book for Xmas and buy a copy or two to share around. Great stories and in support of a great cause.

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Nerdy index

Driving up to Sydney today I found myself behind this car. I had a moment of nerd envy.

Spec Fic writers of the Illawarra

If you're a member of the New South Wales Writers Centre, check out the latest issue of Newswrite to find an article by Laura Goodin about the plethora of spec fic writers in the Wollongong area. There's a bunch of us and we're all friends, as are most spec fic writers around Australia – the community here is really tight. Laura decided to write an article about it.

We all got together at a pub in Wollongong and drank beer, talked about Starship Enterprise pizza cutters and had our photo taken for the magazine article. There were lots of pictures taken. Of course, as I should have anticipated, they used the one where I'm fucking about. I said, "Hey, maybe I should pose all China Mieville!" and stood apart from the group with my arms folded. So that's the shot they used. Oh well.

Nathan Hill, Rob Hood, Cat Sparks, Richard Harland and me. (Pic by Laura Goodin)

I certainly don't have what Mieville has, because I appear to have given myself several extra chins, while Mieville always looks all moody and mysterious. I just look smug.

You can learn all about the NSW Writers Centre here.

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Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson – review

Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson is a book I've been looking forward to reading, for many reasons. Firstly, and this does count for a lot, anyone that knows him will tell you that Trent is one of the nicest guys in spec fic, and I have to agree. He's also a brilliant writer, with over 70 short stories published, and he's taught at the prestigious Clarion South writers' workshop. So this is a nice guy with some serious writing chops. I've enjoyed a lot of his short fiction and wanted this, his first novel, to rock. I'm pleased to say that it rocks hard.

At first I was slightly perturbed as it's written in first person present tense. That often works well for short fiction, but I find it quite tiresome in novel length work. Also, the author is totally locked in to one single, current point of view. This can make it hard to tell a compelling story. Jamieson doesn't struggle with this at all, however, and spins a rollicking good yarn.

Another reason I really wanted to enjoy this book is because it's an urban fantasy thriller, which is the genre of my own novels, so I clearly have a passion for that particular niche. And it's about Death. Capital D. The dude himself as well as the concept. Jamieson cites in his Acknowledgements that he has been influenced by the great Death writers before him and that Death Most Definite is "a fusion of my love for Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Deaths."

Gaiman and Pratchett are two of my favourite authors and there's no doubt they've influenced my own writing. So it's becoming pretty clear why I really wanted to like Death Most Definite. And I really did like it.

The story opens with Steven de Selby in a foodcourt in Brisbane. Steven is a Pomp, a conduit for dead souls to pass from this realm to the Underworld. It's a family business – his mother and father are Pomps – and that's the way they like it. In the foodcourt Steven spots a dead girl. Before he has a chance to decide what to do about that – after all, it's not new to him – she tells him to run and people start shooting at him. So begins a crazy chase all over Brisbane. Steven soon learns that someone is trying to upend and take over the Australia Regional death business, one of thirteen regions in the world. In the process, they're killing off Pomps left, right and centre and setting loose Stirrers, evil, hate-filled souls that occupy the bodies of the recently dead and make zombies seem like an easy alternative. Steven has to figure out what's going on while desperately trying to stay alive.

This is a masterfully constructed yarn, whizzing along at a furious pace for the entire book. It's a thriller in every sense of the word, with strange allies and double crosses, explosions and car chases. And all that good stuff is wrapped up in some absolutely solid world-building, creating an Australia where the business of death is managed on a daily basis by a corporate machine.

The story has some great twists, some fantastic character building and some truly inspired locations and events. When Steven visits the One Tree I was gobsmacked with the terrifying beauty Jamieson managed to create. This is a real page turner, and I don't shy away from the cliche. This book deserves it.

Death Most Definite is the first in a series, with the second volume, Managing Death, out this month. Put it on your Xmas list.

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RealmShift and MageSign reviewed at The Specusphere

I was checking out The Specusphere over the weekend and saw that my novels have been reviewed there this month. It's a very nice review too.

Due to the style of the writing, the view of religion, the rollicking fight scenes, (and Baxter knows his stuff – check out the Kung Fu link on his webpage below!) and the author's tendency not to shrink away from flowery language this is not a book I would recommend for anyone with delicate sensibilities. For everyone else out there who enjoys a good bit of dark fiction, get it on your Christmas wish list, then believe hard in Santa.

That's right, folks. Leave you delicate sensibilities at the door and put them on your wish list. I can supply signed copies for that extra special Xmas gift if you contact me directly through this site.

Full review here.

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