New book out: Butterfly Box and Other Stories

Butterfly Box and Other Stories is available now in ebook, paperback, and laminate hardback, and will, at least for the present moment,  be exclusive to Amazon in all formats.

Below are some photos I  took of the paperback and hardback. As you can see, they look really nice (ignore the banner with 'not for resale' on them - these are proof copies, to make sure they printed correctly, not final sales copies).

Here's a link to the Amazon page:  

And here's the contents: 

The Day the Time Travellers Came (first published in Parsec)

Butterfly Box (previously unpublished novella)

The President is Possessed (first published in Shoreline of Infinity)

Warsuit (first published in Interzone)

Fit for a King (first published in Shoreline of Infinity)

Our Lady of Holy Death (prequel novelette to Devil's Road)

The Light by Which a Dying Warrior is Welcomed into Heaven (first published in Shoreline of Infinity)

Elijah of the Thousand Faces (first published in Night, Rain and Neon, ed. by Michael Cobley, Newcon Press)

You Can Call Me Al (first published in Shoreline of Infinity)

The Moon Man (previously unpublished novella)

Most of these stories first appeared in various sf magazines: Parsec, Shoreline of Infinity, and Interzone. One other started life as a freebie, and another, adapted from a couple of chapters of another novel of mine called Proxy, appeared in Night, Rain and Neon, an anthology of new cyberpunk fiction (published by Newcon Press) edited by Mike Cobley.

My new collection also contains two novellas, although in truth, they're closer to short novels. Each is around thirty-five thousand words long. I'd originally meant to release them separately, but an informal Twitter poll (back when Twitter was still Twitter) revealed people mostly much preferred to have shorter works bundled together. 

The cover art is by Ben Baldwin, who previously designed the covers for Doomsday Game, Ghost Frequencies, and Proxy. The collection contains ten stories, with a total word count of 98,000. I think that's pretty good value for three quid/four US dollars. 

It's been a while since I last had a book out - that was Europa Deep in August 2023, and it's done rather well since then. Somehow, I've created what to all appearances is a sustainable writing career sans regular publisher. Sustainable so long as people keep buying my books, anyway.

OTHER STUFF I'VE BEEN WORKING ON

I've been pretty busy over the last year or so planning and writing the first drafts of two sequels to Echogenesis, a book I released a couple of years prior to Europa Deep. I had originally thought of Echogenesis as a standalone, but then I realised there was an opportunity to expand on that story in interesting ways, and so it's becoming a trilogy. The working title for book 2 is Aranyani, and the working title for book 3 is Echoterminus.

I'm about a third of the way through the first draft of Echoterminus, which means most of 2025 is going to be spent editing both books, then releasing them, most likely three or six months apart. Right now, I'm hoping book 2 will be released in late 2025, but that might be pushed back, depending on how much work is involved. Or, it might not. We'll see.

WHY BUTTERFLY BOX IS EXCLUSIVE TO AMAZON

Now and then I get an email asking if the ebook, for example, could be made wide outside of Amazon, because, usually for moral reasons, they don't want to buy from Amazon but would still like to buy my books.

Previously, I'd point them to a non-Amazon edition of the paperback, say, as a way to avoid shopping with Amazon. But I'm not immediately putting out a non-Amazon version of the physical editions this time around because (a) it's a great deal of hassle, and (b) it can get rapidly expensive. The same process when applied to an Amazon-published book costs precisely zero.

That's not to say there won't be any non-Amazon printed editions, ever. I'm going to wait at least a couple of months, and then decide whether it's worth putting out a non-Amazon edition. Besides, approximately 98% (no exaggeration) of my sales are through Amazon, even if the in question book isn't exclusive to Amazon. 

Amazon recently began allowing small publishers like myself to print hardbacks as well as paperbacks, although these are specifically case laminate hardbacks, meaning no dust cover and the art printed directly onto the boards. A separate Twitter poll of readers revealed this was, apparently, the preferred option, and so it will be with the hardback edition. All that said - this hardback edition is really, really lovely. I'm very impressed by the print quality. 

Hope you all get a kick out of it.