Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Seven, a crime fiction sampler
In anticipation of the US release of my first Serpent's Tail novel, Small Crimes, I'm making available free a new anthology of my crime fiction. Seven contains stories that originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, Hot Blood, Bullet and Futures, as well as one new original story. These are stories populated by con men, mobsters, and monsters, human or otherwise. To read more about Seven and to download the PDF file for it, click here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hi Dave
I've just finished "Seven" - congratulations on a very neat little collection there. Since I received a publication date for my own first novel, I've spent some time over at Joe Konrath's blog, "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing". He's obviously a a great salesman and, much like yourself, unselfish with sharing his experiences in the business. Joe swears by samples as one of the best ways a writer can influence his own sales, and makes a significant proportion (rather than a chapter or two) of his novels available for prospective readers. I recently put up a couple of short stories for download on my own site, as well as a reprint in seven parts in an online publication called "Books Monthly". They've not been out long enough for me to be able to tell if they have an impact on sales, but I'm interested to see the effect of "Seven" and the other freebies on your website. Not that I doubt the word of the great JAK, of course, but different things seem to work for different authors. Thanks again for "Seven", and all the best with the US launch of "Small Crimes". (I'm glad it was a Brit airlift from the trenches - gives us first look at your work.)
All the best
Thanks, Rafe. What I wanted to do with Seven was introduce new readers to my work, provide something that could be read in total in 1 to 2 hours (while most of the stories around 10-15 minutes), but would also leave the reader satisfied and not left with something unfinished. I think there's a danger in putting too much of a novel online--from my experience in publishing Hardluck I people are more impatient with what they read online as opposed to print, as well as things reading differently on online than in print. But the challenge here is to be creative to expose new readers to your works. I really like what Seth Harwood is doing with his podcasts. What's he doing there is targeting a large group where a certain percentage of whom are going to buy the books that they first listen to.
Post a Comment