Almost exactly a decade ago, to coincide with the second anniversary of the launch of the Kindle in the United Kingdom, Amazon UK announced that for the first time it was selling more ebooks than paperback and hardback books combined. The figure the company came up with was that for every 100 printed books Amazon sold, it was selling 114 ebooks. That statistic was specific to Amazon in Britain, and didn’t necessarily reflect the balance between printed and electronic books bought from any other outlet. The Kindle became the bestselling product on Amazon within just a few months of its

I’ve mentioned before that I used to live in the mountains, in the tiny principality of Andorra between France and Spain, which is a many ways a slightly strange country. I recall one occasion when this observation was brought home to me fairly forcibly one afternoon when I was taking the dog out for a walk before we headed north through France to England. In a country where Alsatians and Huskies abounded, we’d kind of taken another route, and our hound of choice was a Yorkshire terrier. Not the most macho of dogs, but pound for pound every bit as tough

When we lived in Andorra up in the Pyrenees, rather than relying on my usual jar of instant, I would occasionally drive down the valley and have a coffee in one of the local establishments. Although this cost money, obviously, my wife was keen to encourage me to do this because, rather than just ambling into the kitchen with a mug in my hand and a hopeful expression on my face, it physically got me moving away from the computer. Quite some distance away from the computer, in fact, as it was about a ten minute drive to the closest

This morning I took a look at where I was and what I was doing almost exactly ten years ago, and some interesting numbers from the world of publishing more or less jumped out at me. Let’s start with some bald figures. In the United Kingdom, back in 2001, roughly 110,000 new books were published, and in all a total of some 140 million books were sold. If we then jump forward to 2010, the number of new books released jumped to about 150,000, and around 229 million sales were recorded. So that was good news, obviously: more books had

Just over 40 years ago, on 2 April 1982, Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands and repeated the action on South Georgia the following day. Luckily for the Falkland Islanders, at that time Britain had a Prime Minister with a bigger set of balls than any of the men who came after her. Margaret Thatcher took advice from her senior military advisers and came to the conclusion that it would be possible for her armed forces to recover the islands, one of the most remote British outposts in the world. The facts of the conflict are well established and quite

Something of a lighter note to hopefully take your mind off what’s going on in Eastern Europe right now, though I do hope that Eurovision isn’t the only contest that Ukraine manages to win this year. It’s very probably a sign of the times, at least in the world of publishing, but this blog post is another one about what many authors and the vast majority of publishers still regard as the darker side of the industry: ebooks.   Ruth Ann Nordin About a decade ago, various writing magazines were regularly producing articles and news items about the then relatively

The latest Russian threat You’ve probably seen typically hysterical newspaper reports about Vlad the Lad’s option to destroy Great Britain using his Poseidon super-torpedo, and I thought it was worth just clarifying what it is and how it works, weapons and such like being my thing. The Status-6 Oceanic Multi-purpose System, NATO reporting name Kanyon, was officially announced by Putin in March 2018. It’s a big and heavy (around 20 metres long with a weight of about 100 tonnes) nuclear-powered super torpedo with an estimated top speed of around 70 knots, rather than the 100 knots often claimed for it.

The publishing process for any book, whether submitted through a commercial publishing house or just knocked up by somebody sitting at the kitchen table and then uploaded to Amazon, should follow similar routes, albeit with some obvious differences. You, an author without a publishing contract, should read through your finished manuscript slowly and several times. This is because you’ve actually written the book so you know what’s coming – or you should do, I hope. So you tend to see what you expect to see, and read what you expect to read, rather than what is actually there. That’s why

I’ve always been interested in how writers come up with ideas for books. I remember reading a very long time ago that Agatha Christie created one of her gentle murder mysteries with the title Why didn’t they ask Evans? simply because one of her acquaintances put down the book he had been reading with an expression of disgust and uttered that line as a comment on the novel. She also famously remarked that all you needed for a novel was ‘a title and a plot – the rest is mere spadework’. I imagine that in many cases, an author is

Yesterday I did something that I very rarely do: I went to Amazon and I checked the numbers of my last three books and glanced at the reviews as well. I suppose other authors find the Amazon numbering system for books and other products just as incomprehensible as I do, though I suppose it does provide some kind of guide as to how well or badly a particular book is doing. The reviews are slightly easier to understand, though again there is a kind of subtext which runs through the system. For example, my James Barrington books seem to get