The Two Empires - free for a limited time!

Yes, as promised, for the next five days you'll be able to download The Two Empires from the Kindle Store absolutely free!

 You can get it here.

I really want as many people to take advantage of this a small possible, so if there's anyone who you think might be interested then let them know. They've got nothing to lose, after all!

The deal will come to an end on 9 July (sorry, Amazon won't allow me to keep it free for any longer than that)  so grab it now while you can. And if you enjoy it, why not leave a review - or pick up the sequel?

I'm still here!

Sorry I haven't posted here for a while.  It's been a busy year for a number of reasons, but I do at least have a couple of bits of exciting news to reveal.

First up, the next book (what, you thought they all lived happily ever after at the end of The Devil's Gate?). Progress was initially going rather slowly, due to a combination of other things taking over my time and a bit of difficulty in figuring out exactly what was happening in this book.  However, the latter problem seems to be mostly solved now, and I'm finding that fired with inspiration the former is no longer such an  issue.  I'm now over 18,000 words in.  It's a long way off complete, even in first draft, but honestly most of that has been written in the last couple of months.  We'll get there, don't worry.

And now for the second bit of exciting news.  For five days from 5 July 2017, the ebook version of The Two Empires will be completely free on Amazon.  I've been meaning to try this for a while, on the basis that the more people I can persuade to read it, the more people are likely to leave reviews, tell their friends and buy The Devil's Gate and subsequent books. I imagine most of the people reading this will already have their copy, but if you enjoyed it yourself then why not take this opportunity to get your friends involved too?  Anything you can do to help promote it will be hugely valuable to me.  Unfortunately Amazon won't let me give the book away free for more than 5 days out of every 90, so if you want a free copy you'll have to move fast!

I'll post a reminder once the sale actually begins, and I'll try to give slightly more frequent updates on progress with Into The Dark (oops, well now I suppose you know the working title too).

As Featured in Forbes!

Something special I'd like to share with you today: an article on Forbes.com that interviews me about my experiences self-publishing.

Before you get too excited, the headline isn't referring to me. I come in about halfway down the second page, but there's a good few quotes from me. It's an interesting read if you're interested in publishing and its future, and I think probably a well-balanced look at the different results self-published authors are experiencing.

I wouldn't particularly agree with McGregor's comment that Jack Burroughs 'hasn't seen much success' - there are more kinds of success than purely financial, and the fact that I've got a book that has been read by so many people is more success than I ever honestly expected when I started on The Two Empires. But the interview with me is I think a fair reflection of my thoughts on what has happened so far and what the future might hold.

It's also encouraging to read about other self-published writers who have been able to make a living from their writing, and particularly interesting to see how it is they've got to that position. I think there are some useful lessons there, even if none of it is particularly unexpected. As in most aspects of life, it takes hard work and self-promotion to get anywhere. There are certainly some useful things in the article to consider, though.

Am I ever going to be the next Mark Dawson? Who knows. I doubt I'm going to release six novels in the next two years. Thankfully I don't have a four hour train commute every day; in fact, as of last week I now have a fifteen minute bike commute, which is far preferable. However, I'm in no great rush. If I can continue to complete books over the next few years at a similar pace to The Devil's Gate I'll be quite satisfied.

As I said in the interview, I'm hopeful that my audience will grow as it has done so far through satisfied readers recommending the books. I'm very much aware that without a massive marketing campaign behind me, by far the most significant sources of promotion are you lovely people who tell your friends and leave reviews for the world to see, and I'm hugely grateful for that. It doesn't take complex mathematical modelling to grasp the potential for growth if one person tells their friends, and a couple of those friends read it and tell their friends, and so on...

Is this 'wishful thinking'? Quite possibly. But hearing from those who have read and enjoyed my work for me more than justifies my continued writing, and in any case I don't think I could ever stop even if I wanted to.

If you're interested, I previously wrote this about the mechanics of self-publishing.

Update 13/04/2014

Just a brief update now to let you know how things are going with the mysterious Book 2.

So how are things going? Good, actually. Managed to get the first half of Chapter 18 down on paper (or pixels, whatever). That will be the seventh chapter of the year so far. The plan is for Book 2 to have 25 chapters in total, plus prologue and epilogue, so at this point the end is very much in sight, albeit several month off at best. (And by 'end' I mean the completion of the first draft, not including any of the many rewrites and beta testing - so, not really the end at all, I guess.)

I am however intending to properly announce the title of the book, and reveal a synopsis, once the first draft is complete. So if you're anxiously awaiting a sequel, there's something to look forward to.

The good progress this year is in large part a side-effect of having the first book out. It's unimaginably motivating to have people actually reading it and saying they enjoyed it. So, if that's you, thanks.

The other news this week, in case you missed it, is the blog post I published on Friday all about Finnish design. If you think that might be something that interests you, take a look. 

The Story So Far

As anyone who knows me could tell you, it's been a long journey to get here ('here' being, as of right now, eight more chapters to edit before final publication). I'm struggling to recall when I first started writing The Two Empires, but it must have been some time before 2006. I know this because the first chapter (as it then was, which is virtually unrecognisable compared to the current version) was submitted as part of my GCSE English coursework in a 'here's one I made earlier' moment.

The Two Empires wasn't my first idea for a book. The first story I seriously tried to turn into a full-length novel was a kind of modern-day Swallows and Amazons with less sailing experience but more child gang warfare. It never got beyond the first couple of chapters, but I had some cool ideas. Who knows, maybe I'll come back to it someday.

My second attempt was effectively Harry Potter in space. Given my vast love of J K Rowling's books and of all things Star Wars, this seemed perfectly natural at the time. The first few chapters related what I thought was a quite plausible first contact scenario, with aliens landing around the world and taking our young hero along to develop his latent magical talents.

With hindsight, the most interesting thing about it was the way I clumsily tried to shoehorn fantasy elements into a sci-fi setting. The Two Empires (and its sequels) rather turn this on its head, by approaching what is at first glance a fantasy world through a logical and analytical style more typical of traditional science fiction. I rather like it.

It was I think a while between giving up on my second book and starting The Two Empires. I wanted to get it right this time, and I spent a long time planning. There's a cute/stupid story about where the first seed of an idea came from, but I'll save that for another day. By the time I started on the first chapter I had the basic skeleton of the first book pretty well mapped out, and a rough idea of where the series was going.

The first draft of the book was entirely typed out on my dear old HP Ipaq PDA. I certainly got my money's worth from that thing; there can't have been many that typed 150,000 words in their lifetime. It certainly wasn't as fast as typing on a desktop, but I did quickly pick up enough speed with the stylus that it wasn't far off. The point was that I could take it with me and write whenever I wanted (for those reading this in the future, this was a time before ultrabooks, iPads or even smartphones). The Two Empires was written on car journeys, holidays, and sometimes just at home. It wasn't a regular process - I could go weeks without writing a word when I got stuck, only to blast through a chapter or more in a few days once inspiration finally hit.

While I knew what I wanted to happen at certain points in the story, the flesh of each chapter was largely made up as I went along. The exception to this are the last couple of chapters, which I had quite a detailed idea of in my head long before writing them.

My old PDA

The first draft was finished in late 2008. I celebrated with chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, which I had read somewhere was traditional on finishing a book. Of course, it wasn't really anywhere near finished.

The second draft involved simply running the first draft through a spell-checker. The third draft was a big one. I printed the whole manuscript and went through it editing in pencil before making the amendments on computer. By this time of course I had 150,000 words under my belt, which was considerably more than when I started, and I'd like to think my writing style had improved a little over that time. The result was a manuscript that from a distance looked like someone had simply shaded the whole thing in pencil. I was pretty ruthless, and whole sections were either entirely re-written or removed altogether if I decided they didn't actually add anything to the story. Even where I was happy with the plot, there was hardly a single sentence that didn't get tweaked or reworked to some degree. It was quite a long-winded process.

The third draft

The fourth draft was more about reading the manuscript as a whole and checking that the plot made sense and everything fitted together. Of course, I still found plenty more linguistic amendments to make at the same time. Throughout the editing process there were a number of occasions where I came across a plot-point that didn't quite make sense. The temptation is to add detail to explain it in order to preserve what you've already got, but then often you find that introduces further problems that lead to further additions and eventually the whole thing becomes very contrived. I learned early on that it's better to simply re-write the original awkward point or lose it altogether.

It was at this point that I finally thought the book could be ready for other people to read it. Well, that's not completely accurate: I still hated the idea of anyone else seeing it, since it certainly didn't feel finished, but I had resigned myself to the necessity of getting an outsider's opinion. I got some of my friends to read it and provide feedback, which proved to be extremely useful. When you're as intimately familiar with something as you are with your own work it can be hard to tell how someone reading it for the first time is going to understand it.

The fifth draft was a response to that feedback, as I cleared up things that had been misunderstood and changed the parts that hadn't been liked. After that I kind of sat on it for a while. During this time I was planning out the remaining four books of The Malkovari War in quite some detail, and I had actually started on the first draft of the second book (it's immensely satisfying after so much editing to actually get back to writing afresh). In the process I had become a lot clearer about the direction things were going and the themes that I wanted to develop more, and so I finally produced a sixth draft in which I made sure that the groundwork was properly laid for what was to come.

After the sixth draft I got some more reader feedback before embarking almost immediately on the seventh draft. At this point I had a clear plan in mind for publishing, and so I knew that this was going to be the last edit. The fear of finally revealing it to the public has driven this to become rather more of a re-write than I was originally expecting, but things are moving. Eight more chapters and one epilogue to go.

Please bear with me a little longer. I think it's going to be worth it.

Work-in-Progress

Right, here we are: my new website and new blog.

I'm currently half way through the seventh and final draft of The Two Empires. This last rewrite is party based on feedback from the last person to have read the manuscript, but I'm also fixing a few minor plot points and improving sentences here and there. I'm happy with my current design for the cover, though I might tweak things a little more before publication.  Other than that, I just need to put together the front and back matter and then the book itself will be complete.

I've been building this site as a break from editing. I was originally planning on coding it from scratch, but I'm very much an amateur web designer and I could have spent twenty hours or more on something that would at best have been just good enough.  Instead I opted to try Squarespace, and so far I'm very pleased with the result. There's no way I could have produced something like this on my own.

I've got a couple of ideas in mind for blog posts.  I want to write a bit about how The Two Empires got to this point, and I also want to put together something about the process of self-publishing online.  Expect to see both in the next few days.  Beyond that, I intend to use this blog to keep people updated about what's going on with the book (and future books!), and to share whatever else happens to be on my thoughts.