I've been trying to find a review which I'm sure was published in either The Times or the Sunday Times without too much luck. The only thing that makes me think it was reviewed is that Angel Stations is listed on timesonline.co.uk under something called 'books first', which is apparently their own, online bookshop where you can buy all the titles reviewed by them.
I'm a touch obsessive about tracking down any and all reviews of my writing, so I've already visited the Mitchell Library, an enormous building occupying an entire block, near the centre of town (one of the biggest libraries in Europe). They have stuff on microfiche going back decades. I didn't need to go back that far, however. I went through the Sunday Times book reviews for the past six weeks, but no sign. I don't know if book reviews are published by The Times during the week, but obviously it's a bit more of a slog to go through all those over the period of an entire month.
And before you say 'online archive', yes, I've tried that already with no results. I emailed The Times' archive dept, and it turns out that for 'copyright reasons' not all their reviews are available on the net, even, apparently, to subscribers. So here's a small request: if anyone out there happens to recall seeing a review of the book in either the Times or The Sunday Times, let me know.
Otherwise, the past week has been spent on line-revisions to Against Gravity, which means the book should be completely done and dusted in the next week or two. I've also seen some roughs for the cover, which is still at the early stages, and could still change (there are some things I'm not too sure about, so I could be about to discover how much influence - or lack of influence - an author has in these matters). Publication is set for July at the moment, and I'm at least assuming the mass-market paperback of Angel Stations will come out at the same time. Myself, Hal Duncan, and Miller Lau will all have books coming out over a three-month period, timed to coincide with the Worldcon next year, which is rather neat. In the meantime, I have about four thousand words of 'Things Unseen', which seems not too bad. Tidy it up a bit more, put together some notes and outlines, send it off to the agent, and see what she makes of it.
3 comments:
Gary you can get "Google Alerts" based on your topic of choice emailed to you. You could use your name as the subject and it will email anything published on the web with your name in the article (and a caveat, of course anything else that contains both your first and last names so you will get a lot of junk along with the real stuff).
- - Richard
Nice tip, thanks for that one. For what it's worth though, I find google doesn't catch everything. I get the impression that articles which are 'databased' in some way rather than being encapsulated in some standard form of html don't get picked up, which is why I miss some stuff.
Rain - due to the nature of publishing in the UK as opposed to the US, a lot of genre books from Britain don't get published on the other side of the pond. For some reason, US publishers (or so I've been told) don't believe books by British writers have any appeal for the Stateside market. Some authors make it across, but only once they've crossed a certain threshold of sales. Richard Morgan and Neal Asher are good examples of this. In the meantime, if you're in the States, you're stuck either with tracking it down in specialist shops which might stock UK books, or buying it over Amazon UK and having it shipped over, which is, annoyingly, more expensive. It's a curious situation, given that the reverse applies: I often buy US books,freely available via Amazon UK, which cost me sometimes half of the equivalent UK price for the same book.
I'm not sure if it would turn out any cheaper, but Amazon does have the option of buying second-hand copies of books. There's a link for that on the page for Angel Stations on Amazon - and I have noticed some of the dealers selling it either new or used are based in the States. Perhaps this would be cheaper?
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