Publish and be damned. But how?

In the good old days, any writer worth his or her salt wanted to be published by a proper publisher. Publishing books yourself was possible, but you had to pay for the privilege, which is why self publishing was often known as "vanity publishing". So if you published a book yourself, you were not just a loser, you were a vain loser.

As you will no doubt have noticed, the publishing world has been thrown into turmoil over the last ten years by the digital revolution. This has mostly been very good for readers: not only do you have the choice of buying a book in either digital or physical form, but there are many more books out there to choose from, and most of them cost less than they used to.

The world has changed for the writer too, especially those, like me, who write commercial fiction. Increasingly writers are publishing books themselves, mostly on Amazon Kindle. And increasingly these self-published authors are selling more copies than their traditionally published colleagues. This is especially true of British thriller writers selling their books into the United States: Rachel Abbott, Mark Dawson, Adam Croft, Nick Stephenson, Dean Crawford, Harry Bingham and JF Penn have all done very well in the last three or four years.

Self publishing has its advantages. It allows you much more control over the publishing process. It allows you to develop a direct rapport with your readers through mechanisms like this email, or Facebook. It gives you much more flexibility in marketing and pricing. That’s fine for digital books, but although you can make print-on-demand books available, you don’t have the connections and marketing budget that a traditional publisher does to get physical books into real bookshops.

I like my British publisher, Corvus. And while I suspect that self-publishing might be the future, I’m not sure. So what should I do?

After much thought, I have decided to publish my books in the UK through Corvus (which is an imprint of Atlantic Books) and to publish in the US myself.

I am trying this out for the first time with my stand alone thriller Amnesia. This was published in the UK by Corvus on 4 May. I will be publishing it in the US myself at the end of May.

For most US readers this is good news. You see, I am able to launch Amnesia at a price of 99 cents for its first week, and to warn loyal readers (that’s you) that it’s available at the lower price. Then I will raise the price to $3.99 for everyone else.

Unfortunately, I can’t extend this offer to readers outside the US, but it should be easier for readers in Britain and Australia to get hold of physical books in bookshops.

So, if you are in the United States, look out for a blog post from me in the next week or so that Amnesia is available at the low price.