We test our eBooks on a range of devices, and keep engaged with the ebook developer community to keep updated on the latest changes from Apple, Amazon and the other manufacturers. I’ve read several comments online from people who say that because the ePub book format is an open standard, a valid ePub book will look the same on all reader devices. If only they knew how far from the truth they were!
Here’s our newest book being tested on a Kobo and a Nook.
Finalising The ePub edition of Conjure, which will be available very soon now.
A grabbit, yesterday.
Terry Pratchett move over. Tom Holt, take note. P. G. Wodehouse, will you stop talking! The Kindle edition of Badger’s Waddle by Nigel Edwards is free today and tomorrow from Amazon.
Click here for more information about the book, including download links, and a painting of a quaint English cottage as it deploys its defense network.
It’s a good job that these digital books don’t run out, as Badger’s Waddle is currently the most popular download of the admittedly rather obscure category that Amazon.co.uk has decided to place it in.
Here’s an excellent interview that gets to the heart of Bob Atkinson’s bestseller: The Last Sunset. If you want to know more about Jacobites and whisky, read on…
After reading Bob Atkinson’s wonderful alt-history novel, The Last Sunset, I felt compelled to interview him in regard to some of the themes surrounding his novel and writing.
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Q: Let’s start with an easy question. Your novel mentions uisge beatha, an ancient form of whiskey, many times. In The Last Sunset you describe it being like “liquid nitroglycerin” in the stomach. (He emptied the glass in one suicidal swallow and felt the nitroglycerine detonate in his stomach….”). What can you tell us about uisge and-more important- have you ever tried it?
Bob Atkinson: Uisge Beatha in Gaelic means ‘Water of life’. In fact the word ‘Whisky’ is derived from that word, ‘uisge’.
Whisky had been brewed in illegal stills for hundreds of years in the glens and islands of Scotland and Ireland. All modern whiskies are descended from those illegal brews. Legend has it that uisge…
View original post 1,726 more words
We’re working on the eBook versions of our forthcoming books. We tend to show Kindle screenshots, so for a change, here’s Thomas Rydder’s collection of dark novellas wearing its iBooks clothing.
click for a larger image
Our pulp vampire thriller, Vampcon, was written by an author more used to penning short literary fiction. The result is a fresh approach to a sub-genre that has become all to samey in the wake of Twilight and other vampire blockbusters. Fresh, fast, furious, and at times, frightening, Vampcon, set in Boston by Boston author Armand Inezian, is a great read for any lover of fantasy action novels, and the eBook versions at Amazon and several other online retailers are discounted this weekend to only 99c/ 77p.
See Kindle Books and Tips for more information about the deal.
See our Vampcon page for the trailer.
Of all the writers I have encountered in recent years, the one with the most unique style is Emma Coleman. Her dark prose is stalked by the psychotic and the surreal. I am privileged to have read several of her unpublished as well as published stories and was delighted when in 2011 she agreed to allow Greyhart Press to publish SiGNALS, one of her more mainstream novelettes.
SiGNALS is a tale of obsession. It is a tale of a stalker, and a quintessentially urban English stalker at that. This isn’t the seedy side on show of a big metropolis such as London. SiGNALS could be set in Kettering or the Gaffney Mark West often writes about. Or Northampton. Definitely Northampton.
We’re revising some of our covers. More on that in a later post. SiGNALS has not only had a fresh coat of paint over its exterior, but the eBook interiors have been rebuilt from scratch, so as to take advantage of the latest services, such as Smashwords Direct (for distribution to iTunes, Sony, Kobo and B&N) and the latest Kindlegen book compiler for Amazon.
At 10,500 words of story, SiGNALS is a novelette, a lengthier read than a short story, but short enough to read in one go without suffering sleep deprivation. It’s a length that I enjoy and I’m delighted to see that eBooks are bringing something of a resurgence for the mid-length novelettes and novellas — a form that outsold novels until a century ago.
At a recommended price of 99c or 77, why not try SiGNALS today? Follow this link for more details.
Andy West’s debut collection of philosophical science fiction, Engines of Life: Tales of Evolution, is now available in the ePUB format from Smashwords. Go treat yourself with the special launch price of 99cents.
Here’s the ePUB edition of Andy’s book, looking rather neat in iBooks on my iPad.
The title page might not look so neat on other ePUB readers. Apple’s iBooks has had pretty shambolic support for the ePUB standard, but I have to say they’ve got their act together and the most recent versions of iBooks have fixed a lot of problems and even started to support selected cuts from a more sophisticated form of styling called CSS3. That’s why iBooks now supports the curvy corners and shadowing you see above, the sort of thing you would take for granted on a Kindle Fire.
Most other eReaders don’t support this fancy CSS styling, which is why curves and shadows and gray text might not appear on your eReader. It’s one of those scarily science-fictional aspects of eBooks: we publish books today that will improve the way they look over time because they make use of features that the likes of Barnes & Noble don’t support yet, but will do in the future. (Of course, the most science fictional thing about eBooks is that we now take for granted something that was pure fanciful speculation when Kirk and Spock used eReaders in the original Star Trek).
Paperback pp224 amazon.co.uk RRP£7.50 | amazon.com RRP $11.50
Kindle amazon.com | amazon.co.uk at special launch price of 99c/ 77p
ePuB Smashwords And coming soon from other eBook retailers
A collection of novelettes and a novella by Andy West with the connecting theme that underlies almost all of his fiction: evolution.
Includes several prize-winning stories. Includes Empirical Purple, The Curator, Meme, Rescue Stories, and the controversial story, Truth, which caused a stir when first published on Watts Up With That, the worlds most viewed site on global warming and climate change.
Tales of Evolution
Six piercing novellas and novelettes of philosophical science fiction, lovingly crafted by a prize-winning author to provoke and arouse.
A sentient anti-meme sends emails to fight its rival in Meme.
A stranded starship crew engineers the development of a primitive alien race in Rescue Stories.
Draw aside the social memeplex veils of man-made climate change in the controversial Truth.
Using hypnosis Professor Merrill probes the ‘proto-Sapiens’ language buried in us all. Yet mining the primitive words unlooses savagery, which kidnaps Merrill into grisly Ritual in Mano Mart.
Awaking with amnesia in a sealed, spooky museum, Guy Green seeks identity and escape. He finds a curious alien, a disgusting Curator, and an appalling future.
Ofermynd meant only to examine the primitive creatures competing fiercely upon 7th century Earth, not reveal himself. Hearing God’s word, Emperor Heraclius declares Holy War in Empirical Purple.
“From the lazy notions of trans-humanists, the confirmation bias and strangling of free debate that corrupts climate change science, to the one, deep, language that unites us all, West takes unerring aim at his targets and channels his passion to deliver winning science fiction every time.”
Outstretched figure: image (c) Lonely – Shutterstock.com; abstract swirl (c) Emelyanov – Shutterstock.comPhilosophical science fiction: Engines of Life will be published tomorrow…
Alternative history romance in the Scottish Highlands
Illustrated high fantasy adventure.
Literary historical mystery
Bestselling espionage thriller
High fantasy romance. Out now!
Dystopian literary science fiction. Out now!
Philosophical science fiction collection
A short novel in the style of Terry Pratchett, Tom Holt, and Douglas Adams
A novella of horror and good medicine.
18 double-espresso shots of verse.
A compendium of fantastic tales for young human adults. Out now!
There is no escape from... the DEATH FLU.
Out now!
In paperback and eBook
#1 bestselling time travel adventure in Scottish Highlands,1746 Out now in paperback and eBook
Speculative fiction collection. Paperback and eBook
SF-horror collection, a part of the Skyfire Chronicles. Available as eBook and paperback
Edgy horror novel ($2.99/ £2.06)
SF/horror novel. Paperback & eBook
YA High Fantasy eBook $2.99/ £1.71 Paperback $4.99/ £3.99
YA short fantasy. Click the image to read it here for free
A double-sestina poem. FREE!
Fantasy novelette 99c / 99p eBook. $4.99 paperback
SciFi time travel novels. Kindle: 99c/ 77p Paperback $9.99 / £7.99 Book2 out now!
SciFi novelette (FREE!)
SF short ($0.99/ 99p/ FREE)
Mayan poetry saga 99c / 99p
Urban fantasy novelette 99c / 77p
Sci-Fi novella
A ghostly novelette eBook 99c/ 99p Paperback $4.99/ £3.75
Horror short ($0.99/ 99p)
Dark fantasy short story ($0.99/ 99p)
Dark suspense novelette ($0.99/ 99p)
Horror short (99c /99p/ FREE)
fantasy novelette (FREE or $0.99/ 99p)
SciFi short ($0.99/ 99p)
SciFi horror short story ($0.99/ 99p)
YA SciFi Short (99c/ 99p/ PRIME)
SF short story ($0.99/ 99p)
Greyhart Press 