Marked down from $2.99; here’s the link. That’s not free, but it’s pretty darn close!
It’s still free on iTunes. That’s even cheaper!
Dover Beach now only $0.99 on Amazon!
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Category Archives: Ebooks
Marlborough Street is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble!
Kindly purchase it for the Kindle or the Nook. Presumably it’ll show up in other places before long. It’s only $2.99, and Christmas was expensive this year.
Marlborough Street’s summary and first chapter are here. And here’s the cover, which maybe is OK:
I have to tell you that Marlborough Street is a pretty strange novel. It’s partially about the meaning of life (which, incidentally, I explain on the last page), but it’s also about the difference between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, and what it means to be a psychic. It’s a suspense/thriller/horror type of thing, but I also tried to make it funny. It all makes sense to me, but your mileage may vary.
Dover Beach is free on iTunes (let’s make it free on Amazon)!
In celebration of the failure of the world to end or something, Dover Beach is now free on iTunes. (The idea is that, if you like Dover Beach, you’ll spend real money on its thrilling sequel, The Distance Beacons.)
You can help make Dover Beach free on Amazon, which will match Apple’s price if we nag it often enough. The idea is to go down to the place on the Amazon page for Dover Beach where it says “tell us about a lower price” and enter the iTunes URL:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/dover-beach/id584966623?mt=11
. . . and report that it’s selling there for $0.00. You can keep doing this if you’re so inclined, and eventually through the miracle of our collective action Amazon will capitulate. Thanks!
Forbidden Sanctuary now available on Amazon!
Other stores to follow. Here’s the link. Here’s the summary. And here’s the cover:
I’m not crazy about it, but it’s better than the original paperback cover, which makes it looks like the novel takes place in ancient Egypt rather than a parking lot in western Massachusetts:
This was my first novel, and there’s nothing like selling your first novel. I think it stands the test of time pretty well, although there are the usual issues with science fiction of a certain age: nobody has cell phones, there’s no Internet, etc. As in Pontiff, the pope is a prominent character, and he is a good guy, struggling to do the right thing in a complex and difficult situation
For a mere $2.99, you can form your own opinion.
A Brief FAQ on Dover Beach and The Distance Beacons
These are private eye novels that take place after a nuclear war of some sort. Is this some kind of weird SF subgenre?
Beats me. They weren’t based on anything I read, and I haven’t subsequently read anything else like them. This is surely not the most commercial concept anyone has ever had, as the folks at Bantam let me know.
What possessed you to write them?
I became fond of the narrator, Walter Sands, and his narrative voice. He is not a very good private eye, but he wants to live his dream, in spite of the obvious obstacles to it. And I liked his friends.
What’s the difference between the two novels?
Dover Beach introduces the post-nuclear world and Walter’s relationship to it. The Distance Beacons focuses on one aspect of this world: what kind of government do people want or need, after the old government has apparently failed so miserably?
I liked Senator. Will I like these novels?
I dunno. They all have twisty plots. They all take place, mostly, around Boston. So there’s that.
I hated Senator. Will I hate these novels?
Probably.
What are the details of the nuclear war that took place before the action of the novels? It’s never described.
I dunno. I don’t think it’s all that important.
Will we see more of Walter Sands and this world?
Yes.
Dover Beach and The Distance Beacons ebooks now available!
These two novels have arrived at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. They’ll show up at other sites, like iBooks, shortly. Dover Beach is available for the minuscule price of $2.99, and The Distance Beacons for the only slightly less minuscule price of $3.99.
Here are the links for Dover Beach on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And here is the cover, designed by Jim McManus:
A description of Dover Beach, along with its first chapter, is here. Previous posts that talk about Dover Beach are here and here.
Its sequel, The Distance Beacons, is also available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Here is its great Jim McManus cover:
Learn more about The Distance Beacons here.
I’ll have more to say about these novels, now that I’ve finally managed to get their ebooks out the door.
Penguin and Random House merge: should we care?
Instead of a big six in publishing, there will be a big five, as the corporate owners of Penguin and Random House have announced a merger.
The deal, analysts said, would give the new company, to be called Penguin Random House, greater scale to deal with the challenges arising from the growth of electronic books and the power of Internet retailers. Publishers are increasingly worried about the leverage wielded by Internet giants like Google, Apple and, especially, Amazon. These companies have vast resources to invest in new technology, like digital sales platforms, and the size to let them negotiate better terms on prices.
The Times article mentions the usual “synergies” that come from a merger–combine warehouses, for example, and you can decrease per-copy costs of printed books. There’s also something about emerging markets that I suppose makes sense. But the big issue seems to be ebooks and digital media. The Wall Street Journal says:
Mr. Makinson [Penguin CEO] said the merger will allow the companies to invest more heavily in social media and other new technologies. With fewer traditional bookstores around, he said, “it becomes harder and riskier to take a chance on new writers because you can’t be sure of finding an audience.” Social media can help remedy that.
I find this pretty baffling. What kind of investment do you need for Facebook, Twitter, etc.? And big publishers haven’t been taking a chance on new writers for decades now–how is digital media going to make this change?
The Times article also suggests that the new company might develop its own e-reader, which is beyond baffling:
The combined company is expected to invest heavily in e-books and what Mr. Dohle called digital product development. He said that did not necessarily mean it would produce its own e-reader device, as some in the industry expected.
And what does it mean to invest heavily in ebooks? What is there to invest in? Anybody can create and sell an ebook for approximately zero dollars. What does the additional investment get you? (Actually, I’m just talking about fiction here; I can see all kinds of cool things publishers could do with nonfiction ebooks if they got creative. So let’s hope that’s what they mean.)
Anyway, for major authors, this can’t be good news. Even if the new company doesn’t reduce the overall number of imprints, it’s hard to believe they’ll be competing against each other as aggressively as if they were separately owned. For new or minor authors, maybe there’s some benefit, but I can’t quite figure out what that is.
For readers, the news could be bad if somehow the combined Penguin Random House manages to negotiate a better deal with Amazon, forcing Amazon not to discount as much (including their ebooks, once the agency model goes away). But that’s going to be a hard sell if Amazon controls, say, 75% of the market (it currently has about 60%, but that will presumably rise once it can discount again).
Meanwhile, Senator has dropped to #3858 on Amazon. Damn–what did I do wrong?
My ebooks: sales, prices, reviews
I handed over my ebook pricing to a publisher in return for having them perform some sales magic. The magic appears to be working. First they made Senator free on Amazon, which got it near the top of the top of the “sales” list for free political novels. Then they raised the price to $0.99, and now it’s up to $2.99. In the meantime it’s gotten a bunch of great reviews. Here’s a five-star review I liked because, when I started reading it, I had no idea how it could possibly end up being a five-star review:
The beginning of this book put me off. I generally do not care for novels written in the first person, and the first chapters were tedious, another overworked story of the dead mistress whose murder threatens to ruin her high-placed lover. However, once all of the players were identified, I found myself relating to the protagonists and many supporting characters on the same kind of personal level as when I first read Presumed Innocent so many years ago. Bowker creates the flawed hero of the classics, a man driven on the one hand by ambition and on the other,by a sense of honor. Even at the end, the Senator possessed strengths and weaknesses that are not entirely resolved. In other words, he is human. This is not just a fine tuned murder mystery, it is a journey into the very complex issues of guilt and innocence-good and evil. For nearly a quarter century, I was a prosecutor of serious felonies, a position not without personal as well as professional challenges. It was not uncommon for me to sometimes relate to the defendant sitting one chair away at counsel table on a very human level. That did not change the nature of my mission–I was considered a tough prosecutor– but it made me reflect upon the difference between the concept of legal guilt and that of moral evil. This is not a story in which the murderer is arrested, tried and convicted, but its resolution is gratifying. In the past 18 months I have downloaded more than 415 books on my Kindle, and read all but a very few. This is one of the better ones, perhaps when it comes to a political mystery, the very best.
Anyway, Senator is now #22 for political genre fiction on the Kindle store, in between a couple of novels by Vince Flynn–should I know who he is?–and two positions ahead of a volume containing Animal Farm and 1984, with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. Yoicks! The book is also #2515 on the overall Kindle bestseller list.
So that’s pretty good! On the other hand, my other current ebooks, Summit, Pontiff, and Replica, are still mired in the lower reaches of the Kindle sales list. Maybe it’s time for my ebook publisher to do something about them. You can help, of course. If you’ve read any of them and liked it, please write a review! It doesn’t have to be as detailed as the one I quoted above. Reviews on other sites besides Amazon are also welcome.
Books without any reviews just seem sort of lonely. No one wants to hang with them. They eat lunch by themselves in the cafeteria. They go home and watch infomercials on high-number cable channels. They buy costume jewelry from QVC.
Please consider helping them out. They will be forever grateful.
What do you do if your future is already in the past?
I’ve been rereading my first novel, Forbidden Sanctuary, as it makes its way through the ebookification process. You’ll like it! Check out the first chapter!
Forbidden Sanctuary is straight-ahead first-encounter science fiction with a religious twist. I wrote the novel in the 1980s, but for reasons that are somewhat opaque to me now, I set the action 30 years in the future–around 2003, if I follow the novel’s implicit chronology correctly. This offers the same challenges I faced with Replica, which is implicitly set in 2024, except that I don’t have the extra 12 years of futureness to play with. All the action in the novel takes place in the near past, as far as a present-day reader is concerned. And, of course, I got some things wrong.
Do my failed attempts at futurology matter? The novel is an artifact, created at a certain time and in a certain place. You don’t expect science-fiction predictions to be entirely accurate. Readers understand this. Why bother tweaking the thing?
Well, for one thing, I’m not completely sure that readers do understand this. The original publication date is right there on the ebook’s copyright page, but that’s all there is to let people know that this ebook isn’t new–it’s not like you’re buying a paperback with yellowed pages in a musty used bookstore. I was talking to a really smart guy who had just read the ebook of Senator, and it soon became clear that he thought I had written the book recently, presumably to coincide with the 2012 election. Er, no.
Anyway, as with Replica, the two major features of modern life that I missed were cell phones and the Internet. I did have some people with “personal phones” that they flipped open, but I was somewhat inconsistent with them. For example, I also had FBI agents communicating with each other via something called “telecoms,” which I guess were like super-modern walkie-talkies. There were also some minor references that no longer work in the world as it actually was in 2003: references to the Soviet Union, for example, and to the never-ending conflict in Northern Ireland. So I did some tweaking.
The thing that I got right, I think, is the role of the Catholic Church in the 21st century. I didn’t imagine the sex abuse scandal, of course, but I did imagine a church fighting a rearguard action against modernity–churches closing, vocations plummeting, but still with many people who believed deeply, fervently, in its truths.
Also, the aliens are great!
Should we be worried that Jonah Lehrer’s ebook has melted into air, into thin air?
. . . and leaves not a rack behind?
Jonah Lehrer, you may recall, is the young author who made up some Dylan quotes in his book Imagine and was caught self-plagiarizing on his New Yorker blog and elsewhere. See here and here. It’s not a good time to be Jonah Lehrer.
Imagine, not surprisingly, has been withdrawn from the market, without any online explanation of what happened. Now an Atlantic writer worries that the disappearance of the ebook from ebook shelves is a bad thing.
There are now links to used copies on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble; original links to the items are still inactive, and at the original time of writing, there were no links at all, used or no. Lehrer’s author site on Amazon still does not link to any of the marketplace vendors.
She connects this situation to the time Amazon disappeared copies of some editions of Orwell novels from readers’ Kindles because of copyright violations.
When Orwell pulled a Kindle disappearing act, David Pogue called Amazon’s actions, “ugly for all kinds of reasons.” Even though (as far as I know) no purchased copies of Imagine have disappeared off of electronic readers, the ugliness is just as strong in the current reaction to Lehrer’s missteps. It is worrisome that the book has virtually disappeared from the most prominent online retailers—and the publisher itself. A simple note saying that sales have been halted pending further verification, or something to that effect, would have been a much more honest, transparent solution. When contacted for comment on the specifics of the decision, Amazon stated simply that, “At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s request, we halted sales of ‘Imagine’ in all formats.” No reply was made to the specific issue of how the request was handled. HMH did not provide a response, nor did Barnes and Noble.
To me, this seems like much ado about nothing (to bring Shakespeare into the post again). Imagine is still easily available as a used hardcover on the Internet. No one has removed the existing ebooks from peoples e-devices. So Imagine is certainly leaving a rack behind. (In this sense a rack, the Internet tells me, is a fast-moving cloud, a vapor.)
I suppose in some ways it’s easier to disappear ebooks than to destroy physical books, but as readers at Andrew Sullivan’s site point out, in other ways it’s much easier to save an ebook, if you think it’s worth saving:
Jonah Lehrer’s book was bought and downloaded by thousands of readers before it was recalled. The tools to remove an e-book’s DRM encryption are freely available and trivial to use, even for a low-tech buyer with a cheap PC. Once the book is decrypted, it’s just another file on a computer, as easy to copy and send around as any photo or Microsoft Word document. E-book files are tiny compared to other commonly-pirated media like movies and music; most are under 10 megabytes, which is small enough to send as an email attachment. And if they’re stripped of their fancy formatting and converted into plain text, they get even smaller. Project Gutenberg’s entire collection of over 40,000 public-domain titles would fit comfortably on an average iPod.
And then there are the increasing numbers of ebooks (like mine) that don’t even have DRM. I’m basically trusting that most people aren’t jerks.
And here’s another angle: I wonder if Lehrer would have any difficulty getting the rights to Imagine back from the publisher. If he did that, he could get rid of the made-up stuff, write a new introduction explaining that the devil made him do it, mistakes were made, or whatever, and sell the ebook for $2.98 or some other fraction of the publisher’s original ebook price. I’m sure he’d sell a bunch of copies! Step 1 in his rehabilitation.
When I started my ebook venture, I went looking for an unpublished novel of mine that I thought might be worth self-publishing as an ebook. Couldn’t find the hardcopy. Could only find softcopy of the first draft. Yikes! I vaguely remembered sending a copy to my friend Jeff, so I dashed off a desperate email. Twenty minutes later I had my novel back.
Computers are our friends.
Richard Bowker 