The Internet no doubt justly deserves a preponderance of the blame for reducing the attention span of most of the western world to the duration of a sound bite. Indirectly, it should probably take the rap for the likely demise of mass-market fiction, too — large Internet retailers, who shall remain nameless, have arm-twisted most traditional publishers to the point of making anything shy of a certain best-seller manifestly unprofitable.
If you still read books in the face of all this, thanks — I still like to write them.
In defense of the Internet and its effect on literacy, it's made small press publishing viable in a way it never was back when books could only be bought from book shops. Actually, it's made publishing somewhat Victorian — returning it to a time when writers wrote, publishers published, readers read and shopkeepers sold chickens.
Then as now, it takes some searching to find books worth reading on the net — the Victorians didn't have access to Google, so it probably took them a bit longer.
Victorian readers also lacked downloadable books — you can download some of the books at this page, and read them for free from your monitor. Both I and my publisher hope you'll find the paper versions of them a bit easier to curl up with in bed or read on the subway, of course.
Alchemy Mindworks' support staff have received a considerable volume of e-mail of late asking when I'd be doing another novel. This mail gets forwarded to me, and thence to my publisher, perhaps such that everyone concerned knows someone's out there to read the books.
Given the choice between reading these messages and dealing with questions about setting the timing in web page animations, I'll take the book requests in a heartbeat.
After the usual longer than anticipated waits and delays, my newest book, Darkmatter, has just been released by Jam Ink Publishing. You have to wonder why it's so difficult to anticipate those unanticipated delays...
Jam Ink books has informed me that it's down to its last few copies of the current printing of The Order. If you want to read it, now's the time — the next printing will almost certainly be trade size, and cost more.
The Order was the first of my books to be released by Jam Ink. Well over a decade old now, it's probably a best-seller by obscure small press standards. I wish I'd kept all the outraged mail I've received about it, decrying the aspersions I cast upon the loyal subjects of Queen Victoria; ranting on about the naughty parts; protesting about the profusion of bloodstains and complaining about how it frightened the horses.
