Self-printing

Michael - Thursday

Courtesy Authors Guild

All the writers on this blog are “traditionally published,” that is their books are published in paper and as ebooks by a professional publishing house that makes its living as an intermediary between the author and the reader. Their role includes detailed editing and copy editing of the manuscript, cover design, marketing and distributing the finished books to booksellers, and, to a varying extent, publicising the book to the readers. The idea is that the authors can concentrate on writing the best possible books and the publisher (and the author’s agent if s/he has one) deal with everything else. Stan discussed here a couple of weeks ago that this isn’t quite how it works out in practice!

Self publishing has moved on from here!

Mainly as a marketing exercise to introduce Detective Kubu to readers who would like a taste and didn’t want to pay for it, we published a small collection of short stories called Detective Kubu Investigates as an ebook in 2013. We were in for some surprises. We wanted to give the book away, but Amazon wants a minimum of 99c. (Even 66% of nothing is nothing and Amazon doesn’t find that attractive.) However, we also offered the book for free from our website. The first surprise was that no one was interested in the free book. They wanted the convenience of having the book downloaded to their Kindles immediately and were willing to pay 99c for that. The second surprise was that what seemed like a straightforward process to get the book on Amazon turned out to be quite complicated and it all had to be repeated from scratch to make the book available through other ebook distributers. The layout, formatting, typesetting, and cover upload in terms of size and shape and a variety of other irritations meant that it took several days to learn what to do and get it done. Even then, the result wasn’t really something a professional publisher would regard as acceptable. It also took multiple iterations to get it right. We were glad we did it (in view of the last surprise), but also glad when it was done. The final surprise was that we sold several thousand books and are still selling them.

In the meanwhile we’ve written several more short stories and we quite like them, so we thought it would be fun to put together another collection to follow on—Detective Kubu Investigates 2. So I dug out my Kindle Direct Publishing manual and got to work. Another surprise. Amazon has a completely new program - Kindle Create - to do this. It took a few minutes to learn how it worked, and after that about an hour to upload the manuscript and get it into a professional format. I’m not sure why I was surprised because it seems reasonable that Amazon would have done a lot of development in five years. I just assumed that, like most software upgrades, they would have made it still more complicated in order to permit me to do a whole lot of things I didn’t want to do in any case. Amazon has gone another route. The format is still pretty rigid, only allowing the choice of a few styles and layouts. They point out that readers have their own preferences and that they can reset font size and style themselves, so the body of the book needs to be in a standard font. Still, you are offered enough layout and style options to make the book look professional. So much so, that I actually redid the original collection using the same software to make it consistent and upgrade its style and format. In a couple of hours. And there is a previewer that allows you to see the result as if you were using a Kindle or a tablet or even a phone to read it.

KDP Cover Creator

I was sufficiently intrigued by all this to try the paper book version. Why not make a joint collection from the two short story collections available in paper? I imagined that this would be much harder. Well, it is a bit harder because now you can’t actually see the final paper copy and you have to make the cover wrap around the book. But Amazon has Cover Creator. It enables you to set up the cover, using your own picture or offering you a variety of set templates or open source pictures, and various styles for the title text. You can upload an author picture. You can fill in the blurb on the back of the book. And then it tells you what problems it’s found and simulates the paper book for you to view and correct. Once more a few hours was all that was needed. But a warning here is that the Amazon version expects you to sell the books through them. Not so good if you want to print some copies and hawk them around. The bookstores will be expecting a big discount and Amazon isn’t going to pass that on. My advice on this would be to print yourself a couple of copies and look at the result. The beauty of print on demand is that it’s easy to correct text and layout at any time.

I came away impressed. But this was only the first step in the process. I also wanted to make the book available in Nook, Apple, and Kobo formats. We published the first book in those formats through a company called Draft2Digital. (There are multiple options now—SmashWords is another one.) I remember that as being yet another learning curve. But again I was pleasantly surprised. Not only was their software just as user friendly as the Kindle one, but it was just like the Kindle one. Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So, once again, the process was quick and painless. I haven’t tried the paper version yet, because it’s still in beta testing and I’m awaiting my “test slot.”

The moral of all this is that it’s really easy to make something like a collection of short stories or a novella available as an ebook and print on demand paper, and I recommend anyone to who wants to do so to give it a go. BUT. There’s a reason I called this “Self-printing.” These systems do not do the other things traditional publishers do for you. You design your own cover, and if you use their templates it’ll be pretty generic. Perhaps okay for ebooks, but not great for paper—especially if you're trying to get a book store to carry it. Speaking of bookstores, they will expect you to supply the books and take them back if they’re not sold—like the publishers do. Then there is the editing. The self-published ebooks I’ve read look nice but tend to need a lot of editing. The best these ebook systems will do is highlight spelling and basic grammar—but you get that in Word or the like anyway.

Then there is the issue of marketing. Nowadays, authors are expected to do a lot of that themselves anyway, but the publishers do help, and some help a lot. I do know authors with successful, well-edited and well-presented self-published books with great covers that sell a lot of copies. But it’s comparatively rare and lots of hard work.

If you intend to self-publish, my advice—for what it’s worth—is spend your money on a good editor and cover designer. There’s simply no need to pay someone else to set up the book for you. There's really no reason to worry about the physical or electronic nature of the book anymore.

____________________________________________

MICHAEL STANLEY EVENTS

           

Tuesday, October 29: 6:30 pm Murder by the Book, Houston, Texas. Michael joins Yrsa Sigurdardottir for a discussion and signing.

We’ll be at BOUCHERCON in Dallas at the end of the month. It looks like an exciting meeting and we’re looking forward to these panels!

Thursday, October 31:

11:00 – 12:00 Panel: The Novel Stands Alone

  Kendra Elliot, JT Ellison, LS Hawker, Stanley Trollip, Sheri Lewis Wohl

  Participating Moderator: Laura Benedict

Sunday, November 3:

8:30 – 9:30 Panel: Detectives Overseas

  Ian Hamilton, Ragnar Jonasson, Michael Sears, Jeffrey Siger

  Moderator: Nancy Tingley

After Bouchercon we’re on tour. Please join us somewhere if you can!

Tuesday, November 5: 7:00 pm Poisoned Pen Bookstore, Scottsdale, Arizona, with Solari Gentill and Tim Maleeny

Wednesday, November 6: 4:30 pm Totally Criminal Cocktail Hour, Stillwater, Minnesota. Contact Valley Booksellers at (651) 430-3385 for tickets

Saturday, November 9: 10:00 Private book club event

Saturday, November 9: 1:00 pm Barnes and Noble, HarMar, St Paul, Minnesota

Tuesday, November 12: 7:00 pm Mystery to Me, Madison, Wisconsin

Wednesday, November 13: 7:00 pm Centuries and Sleuths, Forest Park, Illinois

Saturday, November 16: 10:00 Nokomis Public Library, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Monday, November 18: 7:00 pm Barnes and Noble, Galleria, Minneapolis, Minnesota. More details to follow.

FIFA in Brazil: Time to read A VINE IN THE BLOOD

President Dilma Rousseff takes first kick-off at the Dunas Arena

The FIFA World Cup hosted by Brazil is about to kick off.   I am taking this opportunity to bring everyone’s attention to our dear Leighton Gage’s book dealing with the world of Brazil’s soccer players.  Here is what Leighton himself had to say about his story Vine in the Blood. It is a wonderful book.  Now would be a great time to read or reread one of our blog's  founder’s wonderfully crafted and riveting stories.

Annamaria - Monday  VIVA LEIGHTON!

FROM 18 April 2011:

Once a year, each of us gets a chance to toot his/her own horn.
Normally, we do that when we launch a new book in the United States and Canada.
This time, I'm going to do it differently.

This is the North American cover for A Vine in the Blood:

I love that cover, and I'm anxious to see it on the shelves of bookshops, but it won't be launched in North America until the 27th of December.

This is the cover for the English-language Kindle version elsewhere in the world:

And it's up for purchase, on Kindle, as of today, as long as you don't live in the United States, Canada, the Philippines, the American possessions and a couple of other places.

In the UK, here's the link to the Kindle store:

http://tinyurl.com/AVineInTheBloodUKlink


If you live anywhere else, I can't give you a link, because the URLs vary from country-to-country.
I don't know them all. But, even if I did, there wouldn't be space to list them. They number over two hundred.

Which is how it's possible to put books up on Kindle at different times, and in different places, without violating copyright arrangements with publishers.

I suppose you know that, if you don't have a Kindle, you can download a free application from Amazon that enables you to read Kindle books on your computer or smart phone.

It's not my preferred way of reading, and I suspect it isn't yours, but it's possible.

And it will save you eight months of waiting for the next installment of the adventures of Chief Inspector Silva.

Here's the synopsis, extracted from the copy on the book's jacket:

It is the eve of the FIFA World Cup, the globe’s premier sporting event. The host country is Brazil. A victory for the home team is inextricably linked to the skills of the country’s principal striker, Tico “The Artist” Santos, the greatest player in the history of the sport. All the politicians in Brasilia, from the President of the Republic on down, have their seats squared-away for the finale, when they hope to see Argentina, Brazil’s bitterest rival, humbled by the Brazilian eleven. But then, just three weeks before the first game, Juraci Santos, Tico’s mother, is kidnapped. The star is distraught. The public is appalled. The politicians are outraged. And the pressure is on Chief Inspector Mario Silva to get her back.

Suspects aren’t lacking. Among them, are a cabal of Argentineans, suspected of having spirited the lady away to put Tico off his game, the star’s gold-digging, top-model girlfriend, whom his mother dislikes and has been trying to get out of his life, his principal rival, who wants to play in the World Cup in Tico’s place, and the man whose leg Tico broke during a match, thereby destroying his career. In the end, Silva and his crew discover that the solution to the mystery is less complex - but entirely unexpected.


The book is no cozy, but it's not very violent, either. And there's humor from the wisecracking Arnaldo Nunes to break up the action.

Which is, otherwise, pretty non-stop.

Thanks, Dear Readers, for putting up with this blatant self-promotion.

Like I said, it's only once a year for each of us.

Leighton - Monday

Michael Stanley Investigates...ePublishing

Last month I engaged in a learning exercise.  With our new Kubu novel – DEADLY HARVEST – out in May, we thought it would be fun to put together a small ebook of our Kubu short stories.  The idea was to give it away as a teaser for readers who might not have met Detective Kubu before, as well as to provide a Kubu ‘fix’ for enthusiastic readers complaining about the delay between books, the non-existence of audiobooks, and any other Kubu related grievance.  How hard could it be?  From the dizzy height of ignorance I was sure that anyone with a computer and a few hours could put it together.

We expected the only potential snags to be finding a good title and getting permission from the editors where the stories first appeared.  While we waited for the latter, we wrote a new short story to throw into the collection; as for the former, we started calling the collection DETECTIVE KUBU INVESTIGATES while we came up with something catchy.  The editors all responded quickly and positively, fortunately, but we'd used the temporary title enough times between ourselves that it became the permanent one.

The first problem was giving the ebook away.  I suppose it’s not rocket science that since distributors take a percentage of the sale, they’re not too keen on the idea of the sale being zero.  There are rumors that if you sell it somewhere for nothing (e.g. on your website) then your friends can alert Amazon to the fact that their price is higher and they’ll reduce it.  Well, we don’t sell things on our website (even for nothing) and don’t want to start.  Also, we were told that people believe they get what they pay for.  So if it’s free…  Eventually we compromised.  We would make the book available free to download from our latest newsletter; everyone else could fork out $0.99 – the lowest price Amazon allows.

Now came the fun part.  Stan consulted the Sisters.  No, not a witches’ coven but the Sisters in Crime (SIC), the great national organization of women crime writers.  Not sexist, though.  Stan is a member.  The reaction was muted.  Terms like "Smashwords", "Draft2Digital", "KDP", "EPUB", "Kindle Select" and "Good Luck" were tossed around.  I started to feel a bit daunted.

Now, if you have a Kindle, you probably know that you can send Amazon an email with a PDF attached and get the document back in Kindle format by return of mail so to speak.  I took a look at what came back when I sent them DETECTIVE KUBU INVESTIGATES and started feeling more daunted. 

As the old saying goes, when all else fails read the manual.  One of the Sisters had suggested that.  I downloaded the manual with trepidation.  (You can find it for free HERE.)

Well, here’s the good news.  It’s short and comprehensive.  When it asks you to do something unusual in Word, for example, it tells you exactly how to do that.  It tells you what not to do.  If you follow it carefully, pretty soon you have something.  You upload it and it lets you pretend to be any Kindle of your choice.  What does your masterpiece look like on a Fire?  How about a DX? (I don’t know; I never discovered what a DX was.)  What I did discover was that our atmospheric red-tinged cover just looked a mess in black and white, and was illegible as a thumbnail.  So back to the earlier, plainer version.  And there were things wrong.  But really not a lot.  Pretty soon I was proudly looking at the advert on Amazon for DETECTIVE KUBU INVESTIGATES complete with cover picture, blurb, about the author and so on. 

But our $0.99 book was $2.99 in South Africa!  Hell, it’s the cost of all those extra electrons it takes to deliver it here.  What’s more I had no access to a file that we could deliver to our loyal newsletter readers for free.

I took a look at epub for Nook.  They invited me to download the manual and noted that I had to have a US tax number.  I gave up round about there.

I took a look at Smashwords.  It’s website was long and detailed and invited me to download the manual.  I was getting desperate.  I tried Draft2Digital (D2D), and suddenly everything was simple!  Why hadn’t I come here first?  Just send us more or less a book and we’ll set it all up and publish it for you.  For 15%.  

Now at this point we have a book for $2.99.  The electrons take 2 bucks. Of the 99c left, Amazon has 70% which leaves 29c.  Hell, if D2D wants a nickel of that for setting up the book, they’re welcome!

There had to be a catch.  Actually there were three.  The first one was that when, bubbling with enthusiasm, I clicked YES SIGN ME UP! I got a polite message telling me D2D was in beta testing.  If I had an invitation code, I was welcome to continue.  Otherwise they would let me know when a slot opened up.  I gritted my teeth and prepared to download the multimegabyte Smashwords manual.  But almost instantly my email pinged and there was the code!  Apparently a slot had just opened up in D2D’s testing program for DETECTIVE KUBU INVESTIGATES.

So I sent them the book.  That’s when I hit the second catch.  They didn’t expect me to have done all the good things in the Kindle manual.  They expected me to have thrown together a mess of pages and let them make it pretty.  Making pretty twice produces a mess.  I had to back off and send them a vanilla version.  Then I could see what that would look like on Kindle, Nook, PDF, KOBO, Apple and so on.  (Actually not Apple.  They wanted money for their free simulator.  But Stan could test that one on his iPad.)  DETECTIVE KUBU INVESTIGATES was released not only to Amazon but to the world!  And we had our own freely distributable copies. Life was good.

All was well until we tried to offer the books for free in the Newsletter.  To cut a long story short, our website host doesn’t recognize the file types and won’t deliver them.  We were eventually saved by one of my students who put them up on his server.  (If you wondered what Trained Monkeys have to do with Detective Kubu, now you know.)  Then add a bit of finger trouble and the first lot of newsletters went out without the links active.

I’d like to say there was a flood of complaints, but there wasn’t.  I think anyone interested in DETECTIVE KUBU INVESTIGATES decided it was much more convenient to pay the 99c and get it comfortably delivered to their Kindle, Nook, whatever.  And give us some money.  Thanks, everyone.  We really appreciate that 24 cents!

Oh, the third catch with D2D?  They never asked me for any details of what to do with the money they received from sales.  Maybe that’s why it’s still in beta testing.  Maybe we achieved giving the book away for nothing after all!

Michael –Thursday.

*If you still have the courage to try, you are welcome to download a free version of DETECTIVE KUBU INVESTIGATES by going to our latest Newsletter HERE (page 3)*

Getting EPUB Versions of my Books Outside of North America

If you live in the United States, or Canada, this post isn’t for you.

And, if you read your books in hard cover, paperback, or on a Kindle, it isn't for you either.

But, if you don't fit into either category, please read on.

Recently, I’ve been receiving a number of emails from folks who’d like to read my books on their Nooks, Sony Readers, or similar devices – and are unable to download the necessary EPUB versions in the countries in which they live.

So I thought I’d register two solutions here on our blog.

And then I can simply send them the link when they write.

One way to go is to download Calibre:

http://calibre-ebook.com/

It’s free.

And, if Kindle files aren’t DRM protected, you can use the software to convert them to EPUB files.

My books are available everywhere on Kindle.

And they’re not DRM protected outside of North America.

What’s DRM?

Digital Rights Management. It’s an encryption system some publishers apply to eBook files to prevent people from pirating them.

Didn’t know that?

Then you’re probably no more technically-savvy than I am.

And, for folks like you, I have another solution:

If you download a Kindle copy of one of my books, and forward me Amazon’s email confirmation of your purchase, I’ll send you an EPUB copy of that same book.

And not only that. I’ll include, as an incentive for taking the trouble, an EPUB copy of one of my other books for free.

The offer holds good for the individual titles, but not for this one:

The Essential Silva is a collection of my first three titles, gathered together into one volume, and only available outside of North America.

But, if you buy that one, I’ll send you the other two titles currently in print.

And then you’ll have the complete set.

For copyright reasons, the “international” versions on Kindle have different covers from the North American ones.

But they’re identical in terms of content.

Want to see how they all look?

Go here, to the page where my very talented cover designer, Peter Ratcliffe, displays his work:

http://www.peterratcliffe.com/Peter_Ratcliff_1./Books.html

From left to right, across the top, are all of the “international” covers Peter has done for me.

Perfect Hatred, the one with the photograph of one of the waterfalls at Iguaçu, is a book that won’t be launched in North America until December of 2012.

But it will be available in many other places much earlier.

And I will extend my exchange offer to that one, as well, when it comes out.

The email address to which you should send your proofs of purchase is this one:

Leighton@leightongage.com

There’s no time limit on the offer.

Leighton - Sunday

The Dark Side and the Gray Lady

I love bookshops.

Most readers do.

But authors, particularly mystery authors, have a special place in their hearts for independent mystery bookshops. The folks who work in those places have steered me to some of the best reads in my life, and helped me, time and again, to win converts to my work.

Last year, when Jim Huang was forced to close his beloved bookshop, The Mystery Company, in Carmel, IN, it put me in a bad mood that lasted a week. I’m not kidding. A week.

The people of the Indianapolis area had a treasure in Jim’s shop. It was more than a store. It was a service to the community, run by a guy who loves books. He didn’t deserve to fail.

Other great shops, like Murder by the Book, in Houston, The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, AZ, The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles, Kingdom Books in Waterford, VT and M is for Murder in San Mateo, CA, have been places where I’ve been received with warmth and enthusiasm, where I’ve had the opportunity to meet my fans, and where I’ve experienced some of the major milestones of my career. I love them all!

I never leave an independent bookshop without buying a book.

Never.

It’s the least I can do in the way of payback to people who’ve given me so much.

When I travel, I invariably return to Brazil with bags heavy with books.

I’d order books, by mail, from my friends at U.S. independent bookshops if I could.

But I can’t, because, more often than not, books so ordered don’t arrive, being subject to theft on the way.

Moreover, I’m a voracious reader.

And I always consume more books than I can carry.

Okay, enough of a preamble. I admit it. I have a confession to make.

I’ve gone over to the dark side – and bought myself an e-reader.

It’s a Kindle.

And, I have to tell you, the printed word aside, it is an amazing device.

Particularly for an author who travels a lot, gets asked by other authors to contribute blurbs and reviews, and has a penchant, in addition to mysteries and thrillers, for reading more esoteric stuff in the English language. (And which, until Google Books launched their immense collection of offerings, was pretty hard to find in Brazil.)

And now there’s also Calibre.

You can download it here.

http://calibre-ebook.com/

Don’t try to watch the demo video on the website. It’s too slow. But there are other demos on YouTube that will clearly explain to you how Calibre works and what it can do.

One of Calibre’s niftiest features is that it converts virtually any e-publishing format into any other - and automatically sends it to your Kindle.

So if the material is not “protected”, you can take (for example) an e-pub file and turn it into a Kindle file at the push of a button.

I never resisted mobile (cell) phones, computers or GPS receivers.

So why did I, for so long, resist buying an e-reader?

I think it was a deep-seated fear of what the devices might do to my first love – printed books.

But I have now come to believe that it need not be “either/or”.

And I am convinced that printed books are going to be able to live in peace and harmony with my Kindle.

So if you, too, Dear Reader, have been one of the holdouts, and you travel a lot, may I suggest that it’s time for you to re-evaluate?

And, if you, like me, are an author, guess what?

You actually need it.

People send you books to blurb, and send you books with a request to review, right?

And isn’t it true that more and more of those books are arriving in electronic form?

I have four books in my home, at this moment, that I’ve been asked to critique.

And only one of them is printed on paper.

Something else: you’ve got to be able to check the quality of your own e-books.

If you’re not putting those books up on Kindle outside your home country, you’re missing something.

Amazon offers the opportunity to pick and choose your countries. Each book, in each country, gets its own, exclusive URL. The page looks the same as all the others, but the internet address is different.

As of the day-before-yesterday, my second book, Buried Strangers, joined Blood of the Wicked, on Kindle in the UK, and in Brazil, and in Australia, and in New Zealand and throughout Western Europe, and in about a hundred other places where the books weren’t available before. And at prices that are cheaper than they are in the United States.

But my North American publisher, Soho Crime, did me one better.

To celebrate the launch of the fourth book in the series, Every Bitter Thing, they put the Kindle version of the first one, Blood of the Wicked up for free.

If you live in the United States, you can get it simply by going here:

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-of-the-Wicked-ebook/dp/B001E0KW62/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1188838521&sr=8-1

But you can’t get it elsewhere. If you’re our reader in Vanuatu, for example, (yeah, we really do have a reader in Vanuatu) you’re not allowed to download it.

And I don’t think that’s fair.

So, for the next month or so, here’s what I’m going to do:

If you live outside of the U.S. or Canada, and you’d like a free e-book of Blood of the Wicked, you need only drop me a line through my web site.

And I will respond by sending you the book by email. Please specify if you’d like me to attach a Kindle or an Epub version. And remember that you can convert to other formats by using Calibre.

And remember, if you don’t yet own an e-reader, you can read it on your computer screen by downloading one of the free apps from Amazon. It’s not the best way, but, heck, it’s free.

Now about The Gray Lady.

Most folks in America know that’s the affectionate nickname given to The New York Times.

Respected by most, hated by some, the Times is, more than any other, America’s newspaper of record.

And, for us who read and write books, a publication of supreme importance, because it is one of the few major dailies in America that continues to publish book reviews and support the people who write them.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review Section appears in two versions, one with a cover price sold via subscription, and in bookstores and newsstands; the other with no cover price, which is included as an insert in each Sunday’s edition of the Times. The versions are otherwise identical. And there are, each week, well over a million copies printed.

The NYTBR receives between 750 to 1000 submissions each week.

A mere 20 to 30 are chosen for review.

Of those, only four or five are mysteries.

Yesterday, December 12^th, 2010, my latest book, Every Bitter Thing, was so honored.

You can read the complete review here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/books/review/Crime-t.html?emc=eta1

And, if you’d like to hear a live interview with the author, you can drop in to C.J. West’s internet radio show this coming Wednesday:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/author-cj-west

If you take the time to register with Blog Talk Radio ahead of time, you can use the chat feature to chime in with questions. You can even, if you like, call in.

This is a launch week. I hope you’ll all pardon me for being in promotional mode.

It only happens once a year.

Next week, I promise, it's back to business as usual.

Leighton - Monday

All Over the Map

The folks who contribute posts to this blog have access to a cool feature: Down at the very bottom of this page there’s a little oblong box surrounding the word “sitemeter”.

If you, as a visitor, click on it, all you’ll get is an ad for the service.

But when I, and the other registered administrators of this blog click on it, we get information about our readers.

We don’t get email addresses, or anything confidential like that.

We get general information.

Information like how you got here.  (Did you have us bookmarked? Did you find us through Google? Did you access us via a link from someone else’s site?)

Like how many visits we got in the past hour, past day, past week, past year.

Like which of our posts were most popular, most read, most stood the test of time.

But coolest of all, I think, is the map feature.

When I click on that one, I get a world map.

I can zoom in on a particular area, or I can choose to look at it by continent.

I can choose the last ten visits, twenty, or fifty, or a hundred.

And every visit is indicated by a little dot on the map.

For the last three days, I’ve been doing regular checks to see where you, our readers, dropped in from.

Turns out, it’s all over the map.

You’re on every continent and a lot of islands in between.

Just in the last seventy-two hours you’ve been checking-in from Korea, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore, The Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, The United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Anguilla, Antigua, Hungary, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Iceland, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the UK, France (including one visitor from Corsica), Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Tunisia, Cyprus, The United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Jamaica, The Netherlands Antilles and Vanuatu.

Vanuatu?

Yeah,  Vanuatu.

Honest.

Murder is Everywhere is…well…truly everywhere.

Our books, alas, are not.

The two great impediments to that are language (translations) and availability.

If you’re reading this, you obviously don’t have much of a problem with English.

But, if you’re our reader on Vanuatu (I’d find it hard to believe there’s more than one) you might find it difficult to get your hooks into a copy of Yrsa’s latest, even in English.

That’s changing.

And what’s changing it is ebooks.

Ebooks are exploding.

I just got a royalty statement from my publisher and discovered that my ebook sales doubled in 2009 over 2008, and, to date, have more than tripled in 2010 over 2009.

These days, it doesn’t matter where you live – as long as you own an ebook reading device, you can get Yrsa’s latest.

Last week, I did something I should have done earlier.

I digitalized my first book, Blood of the Wicked, and put it up on Amazon everywhere in the world where Kindle Books are sold, and where I hadn’t already sold the rights to a local publisher.

And I’m going to do the same with my other books at the rate of one book a month.

The cover image, because of copyright restrictions, is very different from the versions sold in places where the book has already been available. Here's what it looks like:

And, if you’re a reader of this blog, you can get it for free.

Not forever, but absolutely free until the end of this month.

Own an ebook reader?

Haven’t yet read Blood of the Wicked?

Live outside of North America, the U.S. Possessions and the Philippines?

If the answer to all three of those questions is “Yes”, then all you have to do is contact me.

Write to me through my website (you can get there by clicking on my photo over there on the right).

In your email, simply specify whether you’d like to have the book in Kindle or epub format.

And I’ll write back, attaching a free ebook.

Again, because of copyright restrictions, the deal isn't available to residents of the United States, Canada, the U.S. possessions and the Philippines - and it expries at the end of the month.

Write now.

Wherever you are in the world, it'll take you less than a minute to ask for it.

And only seconds to download it once you receive my reply.

 Leighton - Monday