Archive for January, 2009

According to this article in The New York Times: Louise Burke, publisher of Pocket Books, said publishers now trawl for new material by looking at reader comments about self-published books sold online. Self-publishing, she said, is “no longer a dirty word.” The movement of indie publishing, following music and film, is starting to shed...
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I’m a strange creature, I’ll be the first to admit it. For example, I love the internet and technology – I use it to publish books, after all. And yet I can be strangely resistant to new things. Now I know that Twitter isn’t really new, but I’ve avoided it as if it were...
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I’ve just finished reading this book. I picked it up at the book shop in one of those purely impulsive buys and I’m glad that I did. It’s a big tome and it covers some very interesting ground and certainly doesn’t pull its punches. This is fantasy for grown ups and I really enjoyed...
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Gung Hei Fat Choy – Happy Chinese New Year – to all readers of The Word. Read all about it here. .
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I picked this up from S F Signal today. The Guardian newspaper in the UK has been running a series called 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read. 124 of them are science fiction and fantasy selections and that list is shown below. As it says on S F Signal: “As if I needed a reminder...
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Fantasy author and all-round top bloke David B Coe has a new release out now. The Horsemen’s Gambit is the second book in his Blood of the Southlands trilogy and was published on January 20, 2009. David spent a year in Australia a while ago and I had the pleasure to meet and hang...
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Well, sadly they didn’t squash the actual complainants, but in a win for free speech and common sense they did squash the complaint. If you remember I was talking about this ad campaign in the UK that has banners on buses declaring: “THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE” Of...
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With both RealmShift and MageSign now available on Amazon.com, I’m ramping up the viral marketing on those pages in the hope of getting them to show up more often in book searches and hopefully sell more copies. Probably the two most powerful tools on Amazon for making a book stand out are Tags and...
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Edgar Allen Poe is a man whose life has affected everyone who reads fiction, whether they realise it or not. I first discovered his stuff as a kid when I saw an animated adaptation of his short story The Tell-Tale Heart. Soon after I saw an animated version of his poem The Raven. From...
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It’s been a long time coming and for that I apologise. But the news is good. I am very pleased to announce that the new edition of RealmShift and the new sequel, MageSign, are now both available here in Australia direct from my indie publisher, Blade Red Press. The books are AU$18.95 each and,...
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