eReader users read more......

 A recent study by UK charity Quick Reads has suggested that readers who use eReaders tend to read more than readers who stick with traditional books.

According to the survey, 48 percent of UK adults who use e-readers say the technology gets them to read more. In addition to that, 41 percent of respondents reported that being able to look up words they don't know makes reading easier, and over half say that being able to change the size and appearance of text helps as well.

The survey also found that 62 percent of e-reader users say that access to free digital books has led them to titles they otherwise wouldn't have picked up. That's an important finding for Quick Reads, which since 2006 has produced free ebooks for less confident adult readers.

This would seem a no-brainer, seeing as the only people likely to invest in a dedicated eReader would be those who enjoy snuggling up between the pages of a well written story, but it's still nice to have conformation that eReaders rather than being a passing fad are here to stay.

2021 - The Colour Kindle

 Rumours are rife on technical websites that Amazon are to finally release a colour eInk version of the Kindle for 2021, and this now looks to be a sure thing. 

The current range of Kindle devices are more that three years old. 

Amazon didn't release any new Kindles last year due to the fact that their hardware is made by Foxcon in China and given the Covid situation the factory has been running at only 30% capacity.

 Several times during 2020 Amazon's Kindle range were completely sold out, before stock was replenished so the market is obviously out there.

At the moment there are a few colour eReaders due out in the first quarter of this year and these will use the second generation Kaleido colour ePaper which has great contrast and its greyscale will work fine with front lighted displays. The format will work on screens from 5.84 to 10 inches and eInk have said that they are ramping up production of colour screens both in California and China.

This serves as a threat to Amazon because any eReader that runs Android will be able to use the Amazon Kindle App, which of course will see Amazon losing out on hardware sales.

Add all this to the fact that Amazon have become a reactionary company in terms of new technologies - waiting for rivals to try out new technologies and iron out the bugs, before stepping in with their Kindle version - then it looks like the smart money is on the Kindle finally going colour.

2021 then, is certain to be the year of the colour kindle.

Global eReader Market Report now available

The Report describe eReader Introduction, product scope, market overview, opportunities, risk, driving force also to analyze the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue, and price, market type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2018 to 2025 Covering North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan India.

Find the full report HERE

New eBook service launched.

Another indication that the emphasis in books in shifting from publishers to indie authors, is that last week Apple launched Breakout Books in the U.S - a new book merchandising feature that showcases books from popular self-published authors, including several that have already achieved New York Times bestseller status. The launch of the new service was covered in both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The service which is now tied into the US iTunes store is expected to make an worldwide over the next few weeks. The Apple's merchandising team hand-pick the titles to be featured and all of them have earned high ratings from Apple customers. So does this mean the team have read the book themselves or are selecting titles that have scored good reviews from customers? I don't suppose it matters really. The service is definitely a good thing and is helping change the image of the self published author as being inferior to their traditionally published contemporaries.

There are said to be many advantages of self publishing over the traditional model - such as the opportunity to bypass publishing gatekeepers; faster time to market; access to global distribution; higher royalties; and greater creative control, but no matter how good a self published book is the real power lies with the distributors, the Apple's, the Amazon's and so on - so when retailers start putting their weight behind schemes such as these, the sole aim being to aid new authors to break into the mainstream then it seems self publishing is fast becoming a must for the professional author.

For my westerns written under the name, Jack Martin I'm traditionally published by Robert Hale Ltd and will continue to be so for as long as they want me, but I have also moved into publishing my own work, under the Red Valley Publishing banner, which is a company I set up to ePublish books to the internet. Sales have not been huge but they are certainly healthy for my Granny Smith series - the first of which is available now with the second book coming this March - If you've not read Granny Smith Investigates yet then why not go and get a copy. The price is low and you never know you may enjoy the book. I certainly hope so, anyway.


Forgive me my little self promotion there, but this outlines the need for service such as Apple's Breakout Books. And I'm looking at making my own books available at the Apple store later this year, but for now you can find them at both Amazon and Smashwords.

eBooks: Sex, sock puppets and Rock and Roll

 2012 saw traditional publishers suffering from more and more eBook blues, while the new media, the eBooks themselves, continued to rock, roll and shake up the established publishing industry.

I saw an article in The Independent Newspaper this week which I found interesting - the article, written by Samuel Muston, warned of the ultimate effects of eBooks being sold so cheaply - "Those familiar with the 1990s cult teen film Clueless, will know of the phenomenon called "buyer's remorse": when the purchaser of an expensive, unnecessary, but highly prized item is wrought with anxiety after handing over the credit card. I got this feeling in reverse on Christmas Day. Downloading Safe House by Chris Ewan (Faber) for my mother (the first book on her new Kindle), I noticed its price: 20p. A 448-page, well-reviewed work only a few months old was being touted for less than the price of a banana in our office canteen"

The book in question has sold thousand of copies in hardcover at the price of £10, and now that the eBook market is so big books are being devalued to the point of being worthless in financial terms. But, and rare for the UK press at the moment, the writer wasn't blaming Amazon. In fact, Amazon were only price matching. The 20p eBook story actually starts with Sony, whose UK ebookstore began the practice of offering 10 top-flight books at massive reductions in the summer. Back then it was Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child making ripples.

A major book – so why offer it for only a few pence?, the writer asked which is also something I'd like to know - surely, no one, not the author, not the publisher can make any money at such a low price!

The eBook market increasingly runs on a wholesale model. Here's how it works: the publisher produces a book and sets an RRP of, say, £10. The retailer then says: we need this book from you at, say, 55 per cent discount. So the publisher gets £4.50 per book and the retailer then sells it for whatever it wants. The 20p ebooks represent a huge percentage loss for the retailer. So why do it? 

"Because it allows them to consolidate their market share.Then in future  they may increase the price" Kate Poole, deputy chief executive of the Society of Authors, "

There was also an interesting piece on Radio Four earlier this week and this bemoaned all the self published books out there, claiming that traditional publishers are the arbiters of good taste and then if we lose them the quality of books will suffer. The program went onto talk about the success of Fifty Shades of Grey which would have never found a publisher before the Internet. But then it was traditional publishing who, driven by the success of Fifty Shades, snapped every erotic novel they could find and rushed them into stores. Was this driven by good taste or an attempt to cash in on a market they had missed?

Sex, sex and more sex dominated the eBook market for most of summer 2012 and by the autumn things hadn't cooled off with the announcement of a Fifty Shades movie and dozens and dozens of self published erotica novels hogging the eBook charts.

Lot of one handed reading done this year

The eBook world is rocking and rolling.- There have also been reports that there is a general decline in dedicated eReader sales, with Tablet devices becoming more popular. Some are calling this the beginning of the end for eBooks. That, of course is bullshit and this false conjecture has given authors and publishers hope that the printed book will return to the economic dominance it enjoyed before the the eReader device.

The eBook revolution continues. As I wrote above eBooks are Rocking and Rolling, and to continue this analogy if eBooks were Rock and Roll music then we would be in the year 1959, we've seen an explosion of the new pushing away the old and the market's cooled off, but the 1960's are just around the corner and beyond that we have some surely rocking decades to come.

  The real reason that eReader sales have dipped is that so many people now own devices and an eReader is not something you need to buy every other month- eBook sales have not dipped rememeber.

 I recently bought a Kindle Paperwhite but prior to this upgrade I'd used my Kindle 3 happily for several years. I gifted my old Kindle to my daughter and she loves it, so now there are two of us buying eBooks. Tablets are great all round devices but they will never replace dedicated eReaders. Tablets offer too many distractions, for the serious book reader, in the form of countless apps, notifications, videos, emails, angry birds and advertisements.There's also the fact that dedicated eReaders use eInk and this is fast becoming visually identical to real ink and paper.

Make no mistake about it eBooks are are to stay and like all good rock and roll stories there has been some bad behavior -

2012 was the year of the Sock Puppet. No this is not literature's answer to bobby socks, but rather authors creating false online identities to build buzz around their books. It all started when bestseller R. J. Ellory was exposed for leaving glowing reviews online of his own books, and also rubbishing the work of rival authors. When this story broke the fallout was intense with the worldwide media picking up on the story. And then bestseller Stephen Leather, one of the UK's most successful fiction writers, was also found to be using many pseudonyms to praise his books. Among Leather's numerous books are "False Friends," "Hard Landing: The First Spider Shepherd Thriller," "Inspector Zhang Gets His Wish," and "Short Fuses."

"You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself … I have friends who are sockpuppets … One person on their own, difficult to create a buzz. If you’ve got ten friends, and they’ve got friends, and you can get them all as one creating a buzz, then hopefully you’ll be all right."everyone does it."  Stephen Leather, the  Telelgraph. Newspaper.


The entire sock puppet saga can not be covered in this brief roundup so readers may want to check out the Wiki article HERE 

All in all 2012 was the rockiest of years for eBooks and 2013 is set to continue in the same fashion.

Rock on.







 

What's in a cover?

Well when it comes to eBooks the cover is of vital importance - ironic when you think of it but on most eReaders the cover is presented in monochrome and without too much detail, and yet the cover is more important than ever. It is the cover that jumps out at the reader in the eBook store and leads the reader to that all important blurb. Good cover, good blurb and hopefully another sale.




Artist, Tony Masero is a man with many years of experience in creating cover art for book covers - I first met him when I was involved in bringing the first Edge western by George G. Gilman into eBook after many years out of print - Tony, you see, did many of the original covers for the bestselling Edge titles from New English Library.  It was a great honour to be involved in Edge's comeback and anyone wanting to follow the series will find many of the books now available on eBook thanks to new guiding hand, Malcolm Davy.

 Tony is available to  any writer who finds themselves needing a cover artist and his rates are very very good. Find him via the Contact link of his website HERE.



From there I found myself working on a horror trilogy - The Dead Walked (part two is out later this month) and I hired Tony to provide the cover art. He did an excellent job as you can see from the images below.




My cozy mystery novel, Granny Smith Investigates ( which is selling like hot cakes at the moment) didn't require any elaborate artwork, as many books in the genre use photographic covers which I was able to provide myself, but Tony did provide,the silhouette of my aged detective - I asked him for a spoof on the famous Sherlock Holmes silhouette and once again he came up trumps for me. The images are presented above.


Tony is available to  any writer who finds themselves needing a cover artist and his rates are very very good. Find him via the Contact link of his website HERE.

And below I leave you with some examples of Tony's work which perfectly highlight his versatility - Tony can provide art for all fiction genres.

Massive FREE eBook promotion

My hardcover bestseller novel Arkansas Smith is out there now in eBook.

 And that's not all  - The Dead Walked as written by Vincent Stark, the first in my horror trilogy. is also free to download for the next four days and tomorrow The Rhondda Ripper will join the freebies and be available as a gratis download for a period of five days.

All I ask if you decide to take advantage of this once only promotion is that you leave a review, good or bad, on Amazon.

Available for free download now

Arkansas Smith II: The Tumbleweed Trail

The Dead Walked: Book 1 - Outbreak

And starting 10 May 2012

Download The Rhondda Ripper by Gary M. Dobbs free for five days and five days only.

There's never been a better time to take a trip up the Amazon

Think you know the Jack the Ripper story?

Think again.

Police Inspector Frank Parade discovers the truth.

Inspector Parade carries out his daily duties in Pontypridd, duties complicated by the presence of 500 members of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, not to mention the thousands attending the show every day. A series of depraved murders quickly makes things even more complicated.

Soon Frank Parade find himself on the trail of a killer which stretches back 18 years to London's Whitechapel killings and Jack the Ripper.

The full shocking story AVAILABLE NOW

The first annual global eBook awards

GLOBAL EBOOK Awards Ceremony August 20th 

5pm Santa Barbara  CA

  contact: Barbara Gaughen 805 968 8567 Barbara@rain.org

Santa Barbara, CA.    You are invited to join us in Santa Barbara for the FREE

First Annual Global eBook Awards Ceremony Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 5:00 PM

WHY EDGE MATTERS

A FRESH TAKE ON THE OLD WEST

No one could reasonably deny that Leone’s best work was not as defining and important to the western genre, as the best of John Ford or Anthony Mann. Leone’s westerns were spawned from imitation and yet became vastly imitated themselves, for in inhabiting the West of the American movies Leone gave the genre a much needed kick, created a heightened reality, both surreal and stylised. He gave the stock gunslingers and clichéd bounty hunters a coolness that appealed to the counter culture. Much the same argument can be used with the Edge novels of George G. Gilman – they too were born out of imitation, influenced by the films of Leone and other European directors who were themselves indebted to the Americans. And they too were widely imitated and like Leone they too redefined the western. For where Leone started out as an imitator he ended up creating a sub-genre of his own, as did George G. Gilman.

They are without doubt the most important of the British westerns – true J T Edson was more prolific but, although highly readable, he took his influences first hand from the great American westerns, while Edge drew from a well polluted by the excesses of Leone, Corbucci and others. This resulted in Edge proving popular with a younger, more hip readership than was usual for the western genre.

A man without fear

A man without remorse

A man who survives because he has … the Edge

Edge comes to eBook

#1: The Loner

#2: Ten Grand

aka Ten Thousand Dollar American

#3: Apache Death

#4: Killer’s Breed

#5: Blood on Silver

#6: The Blue, the Grey and the Red

aka Red River

#7: California Killing

#8: Hell’s 7

aka Seven Out of Hell

#9: Bloody Summer

#10: Vengeance Is Black

#11: Sioux Uprising

#12: Death’s Bounty

aka Biggest Bounty

#13: A Town Called Hate

aka The Hated

#14: Big Gold

aka Tiger’s Gold

#15: Blood Run

aka Paradise Loses

#16: The Final Shot

#17: Vengeance Valley

#18: Ten Tombstones to Texas

#19: Ashes and Dust

#20: Sullivan’s Law

#21: Rhapsody in Red

#22: Slaughter Road

#23: Echoes of War

#24: The Day Democracy Died

aka Slaughterday

#25: Violence Trail

#26: Savage Dawn

#27: Death Drive

#28: Eve of Evil

#29: The Living, the Dying and the Dead

#30: Waiting for a Train

aka Towering Nightmare

#31: The Guilty Ones

#32: The Frightened Gun

#33: Red Fury

#34: A Ride in the Sun

#35: Death Deal

#36: Town on Trial

#37: Vengeance at Ventura

#38: Massacre Mission

#39: The Prisoners

#40: Montana Melodrama

#41: The Killing Claim

#42: Bloody Sunrise

#43: Arapaho Revenge

#44: The Blind Side

#45: House On the Ranged

#46. The Godforsaken

#47: The Moving Cage

#48: School for Slaughter

#49: Revenge Ride

#50: Shadow of the Gallows

#51: A Time for Killing

#52: Brutal Border

#53: Hitting Paydirt

#54: Backshot

#55: Uneasy Riders

#56: Doomtown

#57: Dying is for Ever

#58: The Desperadoes

#59: Terror Town

#60: The Breed Woman

#61: The Rifle

For more than twenty years the Edge books dominated the western scene, equally successful in the UK and US and in fact translated into ten different languages. And if any western series deserves to be brought back into print it is the Edge series.

THE EASE OF KINDLE FOR PC

A friend of mine, Nik Morton recently had published Spanish Eye, a collection of short stories about a Spain based private eye, in eBook and I headed over to Amazon to secure my copy. I don't own a Kindle and so immediately I pressed "buy" , a free AP, "Kindle for PC" was downloaded to my computer and a second later I had the book on the screen.
Couldn't be easier.

Expect a review of Nik's book here soon.


And remember my own A Policeman's Lot is also available on Amazon HERE

Inspector Frank Parade carries out his daily duties in the Welsh industrial town of Pontypridd, duties complicated by the unprecedented presence of 500 members of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show encamped outside the town, not to mention the thousands attending the show every day. A series of depraved murders quickly makes things even more complicated. Buffalo Bill stands squarely in his path when Parade tries to investigate the likely possibility that one of the hundreds of show members is involved. And soon enough Parade’s own superiors are blocking his inquires, too. Still more deaths occur as Parade sifts through the thin evidence available and finds a trail that may lead to the perpetrator of the most heinous crime of the 19th Century—London’s “Ripper” murders.

Shocking revelations come thick and fast.

The greatest criminal mystery in history is about to be solved by a Welsh copper and an American Legend.

Edge eBook new cover artwork

I love the new look - the cover was created by artist, Tony Masero and by combining two of his original paintings he has created an all new look for Edge's foray into the digital world.

I'm so pleased with the design, especially the lettering of the word Edge - It is also fitting that the razor is so prominent as the rather nasty weapon was a trademark of the character - it looks awesome and is a fitting painting to bring back the legend of the Wild West. It is also superb that Tony is involved in bringing these classic westerns back - Terry and I did discuss going with an all new look but only for a second and were ecstatic when Tony came through with the goods. As a fan of the original series I think I would have been disappointed without the classic cover feel. But what Tony has given us is both contemporary and traditional. Anyone interested in finding out more about the artist I direct them to the interview over on Western Fiction Review.

Next - I will publish for the first time digitally, a 1979 article by Edge author, Terry Harknett entitled - Writing Westerns.

THE WEST IS ELECTRONIC

Author, Charles Gramlich has taken the wild west into the electronic frontier with his new eBook, a collection of wild west themed short stories, The Killing Trail.

A word from Charles:

"LET ME tell you a little about the book and how it got set up. First, the cover design (seen at top) is a collaboration between Lana and I, though mostly Lana. The picture is of my Uberti .357 single action revolver. The background is a weather-worn bench at the nearby Flatwoods nature preserve. Lana took the pic a while back and I decided it would make the right cover for Killing Trail. I showed Lana a mockup, which I actually published on the blog when I first started talking about doing this book. Lana found the great western style font and did the frame and color scheme."

You're all invited to the launch party so -


CHECK IT OUT HERE