The Cost of Kindle Select

I checked my balance on Smashwords this morning, as I do intermittently—Smashwords does not have anything like the real-time reporting of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing so it is not nearly so addictive. I am not sure I completely understand Smashwords arcane system of accounting but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I am owed roughly $150. That’s not a great deal for a 5 month reporting period but it’s all extra money, most of it earned in the past three months. That got me thinking about Amazon’s Kindle Select program and its exclusivity clause, the one that says you Read more…

Ebook News

On Saturday, I sold the one thousandth ebook of Death’s Angels. It was a nice milestone to pass. It comes in the first month in which I have sold over a thousand ebooks too. All in all I have sold a couple of thousand books in the Terrarch series and roughly 2400 ebooks in total including short stories and collections. I have also had roughly five thousand downloads of the Guardian of the Dawn since it went free. I started selling ebooks in July and have released one of the Terrarch books roughly every six weeks since then. The last Read more…

Angel of Fire Delivered

I have just sent The Angel of Fire in to Black Library.  It’s my first 40K in a long time and it’s my first ever book written for Black Library in the first person singular. It was a lot of fun and a very different experience looking at the 41st Millennium from the point of view of an ordinary soldier rather than that of a Space Wolf. I am now waiting for feedback from my esteemed editor Nick Kyme at Black Library and soon, I hope I will be making the necessary revisions and pushing on to the second book in the Macharian Crusade Read more…

Kindles, Kindles Everywhere

Amazon has just announced a raft of new Kindles, including what looks like the first serious challenger to Apple’s iPad, the Kindle Fire. Before the Apple fans start howling me down, let me point out why I think this is the case; it has nothing to do with utility or the OS or how wonderful the iPad is or is not. It’s the price ($199) combined with access to Amazon’s awesome (and, yes, I do use some of them) cloud services. The Kindle is tied to Amazon’s e-commerce platform but that is no bad thing given the library of movies, Read more…

Death’s Angels: the 99 Cent Experiment

Financial alert: this post talks about money. If you are one of those people who get offended when writers talk about finances, look away now! Some of you may remember that a month ago I dropped the price of Death’s Angels to $2.99  to see if it had any effect on sales. The basic theory was that the more people who read the first book in the series, the more would be likely to read the second and the third and so on. The Terrarch books are an ongoing narrative; they have an epic storyline that progresses rather than just being Read more…