A Nice Thing

I was surprised and pleased to receive an email from a site called BookWorks.com saying that my novel The Hard Swim had been made their 'Book of the Week.'

BookWorks bill themselves as 'The Self-Publishers Association' and I happen to know they're associated with Publishers Weekly, the bible of bookselling. So it's no small accolade, and I'm appropriately grateful and humbled.

Self-Publish Your Book

A colleague and friend, Jessica Bell, has had her Facebook page suspended for some mystical - probably mythical - reason, just at the point where she has a new book published. So myself and several other colleagues are publishing her pitch for the book so that she can get at least some promotion while her FB page is down. Here's the pitch:

Are you ready to self-publish your book, but dreading the massive learning curve? Well, there’s no need to dread it anymore!

This 6th installment of the bestselling
Writing in a Nutshell Series, will not overwhelm you with all information available—it will tell you exactly what you need to know, without the faff, by following a foolproof, cost-efficient, time-efficient, extremely easy-to-follow, step-by-step self-publishing method.

Want to go from manuscript to a professionally published book within one week? Then this is the book for you.

You’ll learn how to: prepare your manuscript in Microsoft Word, design your paperback and eBook cover, prepare your front/back matter and blurb, format your paperback interior & eBook, proofread your designed pages, register with desired retailers/distributors, export your eBook to a retail-ready file and upload your paperback and eBook to retailers/distributors.

Not only will this book save you time and money, but it will also save you from inevitable stress. What are you waiting for? Grab a copy of Self-publish Your Book today! 

Jessica's an excellent writer, musician and book designer and I'm sure if you're entering the hazardous waters of self-publishing that this book will be a great boon. Rush out and buy it now! (Or stay in and buy it, I don't care which.)

Revisions, revisions ...

I decided to issue new editions of my Sam Dyke Investigations, with revised covers. I haven't completed all of the work yet, but here's a sample of those I've finished ...

The Secret Sharers

If you have eagle eyes you'll probably have noticed a new book cover on the right of this page - well, The Secret Sharers will be available for download from 1st May at all the usual sites: Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Kobobooks, iTunes and so on.

If you have the courage to read it, I'd be grateful for a review as reviews drive interest and traffic - which, if I'm to be selfish about it, is good for future work ...

Venture into audiobooks ...

A quick plug to say that the first Sam Dyke book, Altered Life, is now available as an audiobook. It's read by the wonderful Rob Ellis in a fashion that brings out the Chandleresque tones of the prose (he said hopefully ... )

Rob is working on the other books in the series too, which will be released over the next twelve months or so.

The audio versions will be available through Amazon, Audible and iTunes, so there should be an outlet you can use. There seems to be a deal if you're a first-time user of Audible you can download it for free - can't be bad!

Re-reading Chandler

Some years after reading Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely, I thought it was about time I read his other most famous novel, The Long Goodbye. I had fond memories of the ‘reworking’ of the story in Robert Altman's 1973 film starring Elliott Gould and wondered how Chandler’s style would stack up against some of the modern crime writers I’d been reading in the last few years.

The Long Goodbye shows Philip Marlowe becoming involved in what appears to be two separate cases but which wind up being connected. The first is his growing friendship with Terry Lennox, who turns out, it seems, to be the murderer of his rich socialite wife. After the friendship ends with Marlowe driving Lennox to Mexico to escape a possible charge of murder, the second storyline picks up: Marlowe is hired by Eileen Wade, the wife of famous novelist Roger Wade, to find her husband, who is a drunk and has either gone off on a bender or is drying out somewhere in a sanatorium. These two plot-lines converge in more violence in which Marlowe is implicated but doesn’t participate.