4/19/2018

Scienceville five weeks on, and vague future plans

I just posted Chapter Three of Last Tour of the Apocalypse to my Patreon page. So, a reminder: if you not only want to read a new book by me, one following on from the events in Extinction Game and Survival Game, you can not only read it as it appears chapter by chapter every couple of weeks, right now, you can see it in its raw form, meaning somewhat edited, but not quite polished. And it'll only cost you a dollar or so a month to read them as they appear.

It's a bit over a month now since I published Scienceville and Other Lost Worlds and, well...it's done pretty well, actually! It's sold a lot more copies than I thought it would. As for how much it's made - enough for me to take my ageing and wheezing 2012 MacBook Pro to the GuangHua Digital Plaza in central Taipei a couple of weeks after the launch and get it upgraded to a shiny new 256Gb SSD drive. And now it just whizzes along.

And, you know, if you haven't read it yet, you could always click on that link on the right (if you're seeing this on a computer screen, anyway) and buy Scienceville. If you're reading this on a phone, here's a link to the relevant Amazon page.

And the collection does continue to sell, I'm delighted to say. There are several four or five star ratings on Goodreads, but just the one lonely five-star review on Amazon UK. If you read it and liked it, consider leaving a quick review on Amazon.

For the moment, I'm keeping the collection exclusive to Amazon, but at some point eventually I guess I'm going to have to 'go wide' and sell it on other platforms as well. I'm also - slowly - designing a paperback version too. My hope is I might even be able to persuade some convention vendors in the UK to take a couple of copies, but we'll see.

One side note: while the book is selling well, about 95% of those sales are in the UK. Sales in the US, by contrast, remain very low. Why this is, or why none of my books have gained traction in the US, at least not in terms of scoring a Stateside book deal, is something that's long escaped me. But I also know it's the case that many, many British sf writers just don't seem to appeal that much to American readers, bar a certain minority, so perhaps that's the case here. If so, fair enough: I know where my audience lies.

The collection is doing well enough - and will, one can only hope, continue to do well enough - that I'll now seriously consider writing something specifically for future self-publication. To be clear, this does not mean I am abandon traditional publishing: far from it. But I am a fan of the hybrid model, wherein you can pursue a career in both.