Today’s Post Is Brought To You By The Letter E

Allan Guthrie runs an interesting new blog called e-books that sell, and yesterday he had a fascinating post titled ‘Observations from the e-front’. It got me thinking, mainly because my e-book doesn’t sell, whereas the books on Allan’s blog sell in their thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands. Mostly it got me thinking about the reasons why my e-book doesn’t sell - apart, obviously, from reasons such as ‘a lack of promotion’, or ‘failure to establish word-of-mouth’, or (the classic) ‘it’s rubbish, mate’.
  Anyway, here’s my variation on Allan’s ‘Observations from the e-front’; any and all feedback is hugely welcome. Except for the ‘it’s rubbish, mate’ variety, obviously - we’ve covered that one extensively already, ta very much.

Observations from the e-front (a writer replies while thinking aloud)

1. I don’t belong on ‘e-books that sell’.
2. Mainly because my e-book doesn’t sell.
3. That’s my fault - I’d rather to have readers than money (I like my day job; I write for fun).
4. But I want to connect my e-book with readers. Where do I go?
5. How do I persuade readers to take a chance on my book?
6. Can I be sure my book offers value for money?
7. Can I be sure my book offers value for time?
8. What websites and / or blogs should I be touching base with?
9. Can a UK reader download a US-published e-book?
10. What other questions should I be asking myself?

CRIME ALWAYS PAYS by Declan Burke

Available on Kindle and many other formats

When a heist goes west, Karen and Ray head south, next stop the Greek islands. On their trail are Karen’s ex-con ex- Rossi, his narcoleptic wheelman Sleeps, jilted cop Doyle, and Melody, an indie filmmaker with an eye for the wide angle and a nose for the big score. The Monte Carlo grand prix of road-trip comedy capers, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is a furiously fast and funny screwball romp that barrels through Amsterdam and Rome in a welter of double- and treble-crosses in the company of a motley crew with their eyes on the prize of riding off with the loot into that glorious Santorini sunset …

Reviews for CRIME ALWAYS PAYS:

“CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is part road movie and part farce, reminding me sometimes of Elmore Leonard, sometimes of Allan Guthrie, sometimes of Donald Westlake and sometimes of the Coen brothers – sometimes all at once.” – Glenn Harper, International Noir

“The comparisons to Elmore Leonard’s style are warranted and deserved, but Burke has managed to put his own unique spin on it … For anyone looking for some escapism, a great read, and a lot of fun, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is for you.” - Smashwords review (*****)

“FIVE stars for sure!” - Smashwords review (*****)

“CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is a fun yet complex novel, which definitely falls under the heading of screwball … The unique mixture of a fun cops and robbers caper and the complex plot and character relationships makes this novel highly enjoyable and worth a read, or even a re-read.” - Smashwords review (****)

“The end result is a little like what might be expected if Elmore Leonard wrote from an outline by Carl Hiaasen ... [It’s] about the flow, the feel, the dialog, the interactions among characters, not knowing who’s working with - or against - who, the feeling that anything might happen at any moment. It’s as close to watching an action movie as a reading experience can be.” - Dana King, the New Mystery Reader

  If you fancy reading some sample chapters, feel free to clickety-click here …

It’s A Fair Cop’s Union, Guv

Adrian McKinty (right) has his own interweb doohicky, and yet for some reason he insists on sending me top quality material for use on Crime Always Pays. To wit:

Alaska Schmalaska

In Michael Chabon’s universe, a self-described redneck like Sarah Palin could never have become governor of Alaska. Why? Because in his world Alaska isn’t a frontier bastion for moose-killing survivalists but rather is the transplanted home for two million cosmopolitan Jewish refugees crammed into the sprawling city of Sitka just south of Juneau in the Alaskan panhandle. This is the central conceit of Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION, a murder mystery and alternative history noir, that follows Detective Mayer Landsman’s quest to find the person or persons who killed the quiet chess master who lived in his overcrowded flop house.
  In what used to be called ‘the Jonbar Hinge’ among us sci-fi buffs, the moment Chabon’s Earth diverged from ours was sometime in the late 1930s, when the US government allowed unlimited Jewish migration from a Hitler dominated Europe to refugee camps in Alaska.
  The book is a kind of a ghost story, imaging the unlived lives of hundreds of thousands of people who, in the real world, were murdered by the Nazis. Chabon’s fantasy is that instead of this vibrant, rich, literary Yiddish culture becoming extinct in 1945, it crossed the Atlantic and survived in America.
  So that’s the premise but what of the book? In many ways it’s a standard police procedural of the Ed McBain / Mickey Spillane school that Chabon has composed in an affectionate pulp 1940’s style. He writes in the urgent present tense with a great deal of panache and economy. Chabon’s metaphors aren’t quite as rich as Raymond Chandler’s (whose are?) and his steeliness isn’t up there with Hammett, but his jokes are as good and sometimes better. His humour is Yiddish humour. Dry, slightly surreal, dark. There’s a gag or Chandlerism every few pages: ‘She took a compliment the way some people take a can of soda that they suspect you’ve shaken first.’
  The plot takes a while to get going but that’s ok, as you want to get to grips with Chabon’s Alaska, the alternate time-line and the offbeat characters. When the murder mystery does start to unfold, Chabon spins the yarn with intelligence, style and tight plotting.
  Alternative History novels are en vogue and a different outcome for World War II is by far the most popular scenario. Philip Roth’s THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA covered similar terrain only three years ago and we’ve also had FATHERLAND, SS GB among many recent others. Chabon himself is a fan of Philip K Dick’s AH novel THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, which towers above all contenders in the ‘Nazis win the war’ field.
  Although Chabon isn’t quite off in terra nova, what really stuck with me was the idea that every single person in Sitka – the former capital of Russian America (now there’s an idea for an AH novel) – was speaking Yiddish. There’s Yiddish TV, newspapers, radio, songs. Even the Irish newspaper hack talks a kind of low German. I liked this notion because although now virtually extinct as a literary tongue, Yiddish produced an extraordinary corpus of poems, plays and novels in its brief flowering, and today its influence can be felt in everything from Woody Allen films to Mel Brooks and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Irony is the default stance of Yiddish prose. Irony, embedded with black witticisms and a kind of grim fatalism. I have read a critique that Chabon’s style is ‘not Yiddish enough’ and certainly compared with Nobel Prize winner’s IB Singer’s it seems mannered and even a little forced. But actually Chabon does have a precursor in the lesser known Yiddish master Lamed Shapiro, whose American stories were influenced by the US hard-boiled school and seem strikingly similar to Chabon’s mix of paranoia, violence and defiant logic-inverting humour.
  THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION is a thoughtful, introspective novel which did well on release and it’s probably going to do even better when the Coen Brothers make the movie version in 2010. My only criticism is that I don’t think the AH scenario really adds that much to the narrative and I wonder if the novel might not have worked just as well in our universe. Chabon said that the AH was necessary because ‘the Yiddish world is dead’, and while it is true that the Nazis destroyed Yiddish Europe (and the survivors mostly migrated to Israel where they had to speak Hebrew), Yiddish did not die out completely. My own wedding ceremony was in Yiddish at a Yiddish-Bundist commune in Putnam Valley, New York, and anyone who’s been to Kiryas Joel, NY, will find an entire town of 20,000 Haredi Jews with Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish street signs, Yiddish coffee shops, Yiddish schools, self published Yiddish spy novels. And yes, Kiryas Joel even has Yiddish speaking policemen. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND will be published by Holt in 2009