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At the Sharpe End My second published novel. Click the cover for more information, including ordering signed copies:
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 The Hindenburg – the model for the Zeppelin Bismarck in Beneath Gray Skies David Slater, a conscript in the 1920s Army of the Confederacy, faces a dilemma. When he and his regiment were shipped to Germany to help stage a coup there, his Limey fellow-soldier Brian was acting strangely. David now has the choice of reporting his best friend to his commanding officers, or keeping quiet and just doing his job: preparing for the arrival of Bismarck, the giant Zeppelin flying Hitler and his Nazi cohorts to meet their new allies, the Confederates.
Beneath Gray Skies follows the adventures of David and those around him in a past that never happened-where the Civil War never took place, and the Confederacy survived as a pariah slave-holding nation into the 20th century. Confederates, Unionists, British and Germans plot and counterplot in a tightly woven tale of espionage, treachery and romance.
More on “About Beneath Gray Skies” here…
…in anticipation of a sharp kick aimed somewhat lower down at some time in the future.
But for now, life seems pretty good on the j-views publishing front. Beneath Gray Skies has at last started to sell through Amazon Japan (the new edition, that is – quite a few copies of the first (Lulu) edition made it out to Japanese readers). This is great – I like Gray Skies a lot, and really think a lot more people will enjoy it than the alternative history “genre” label would seem to indicate.
And last night, whether as a result of continued nagging on Facebook and Twitter, or Mark Schreiber’s Japan Times review (see previous post), At the Sharpe End suddenly found itself for a short while as the fifth-best selling Thriller on Amazon Japan (don’t believe me? See the screenshots). That number has now dropped down – and it is probably the result of a relatively small sales volume, but I can, with perfect truth (perfect? you ask. All things are relative, says I.) claim to have written a “bestseller”.
Whatever, both volumes now are in the top 5,000 sellers (overall, not just Thrillers) of foreign books on Amazon Japan. Granted it’s a relatively small market, and it’s a biggish fish swimming in a smallish pond, but for a one-man publishing operation, it’s not bad at all (with all due modesty).
Whatever, thanks are due to the readers, whoever and wherever you may be, who have brought this about. I’m still high on the buzz of the number 5 ranking.
Well, I’ll tell you what it’s like when I actually am famous, which of course I’m not at the moment. But it is nice, I must admit, to see my name in the paper (and I don’t mean in the crime or court section). Of course, since I write regular pieces for magazines, it’s quite common to see my name in print, but it’s different when it’s actually about you rather than by you.
The Japan Times has just printed a brief, but rather good, review of At the Sharpe End. I was really pleased that the reviewer picked up on something that I really stressed in a book proposal for an earlier version of the book – the fact that it is not a “mystical East” book with the ancient Orient dripping from every page. To quote the reviewer, Mark Schreiber (who has suffered through too many of the clichés in his years as a book reviewer in Japan):
To his credit, Ashton has turned out a credible story set in Japan that doesn’t attempt to rehash “You Only Live Twice.” He eschews the obligatory mixed bathing scene, violent altercations with sumo wrestlers and ninja armed with fugu poison. So don’t expect gunshots in Ginza, swordplay in Shimbashi or mayhem in Meguro.
Good. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.
And this is what he wrote in full (click to enlarge):
So… I’m enjoying my 15 minutes of fame. It’s nearly over, but it was nice while it lasted. It does make it worthwhile.
Oh, I’ve decided to spin off At the Sharpe End into another Twitter account. Follow for news and views in under 140 characters.
 Just discovered this really nifty little iPad app called 3D cover, that allows you to map images onto objects like books, DVDs, etc. and add text. It then exports as a JPEG file.
This is an example (and a hint to any Hollywood producers reading this). Click to enlarge.
 I haven’t forgotten this blog, nor Beneath Gray Skies, but I’ve been putting more effort recently into At the Sharpe End, getting ready for the book signing and reading on 26 August. Taking place at the Pink Cow, Tokyo, with the ¥3,000 price of admission to cover a drink, a buffet, and a signed copy of the book (book is approximately ¥1,500 from Amazon Japan, by the way). There’s a blues band turning up, and Chris Young will be showing parts of his new movie and talking about it. Should be a good evening. Book your places at the Web site. Click the thumbnail of the poster for a larger view.
I’ve also put together a little video on the At the Sharpe End Web site that should help to give an idea of the book.
Right now, I’m interested in what the pundits are saying about ebooks. I saw something by an executive of Random House claiming that paper would survive as a publishing medium for the indefinite future, and another piece Nicholas Negroponte claiming that paper would be dead within five years. The truth almost certainly lies between these two extremes. Negroponte has a history of “brave new world” predictions (as far as I know, he’s never predicted flying cars for everybody in the next 10 years, but he seems to have predicted the computing equivalent several times), and publishers seem to be determined to drag their feet firmly backwards (recently heard of a title on mobile business, which is still unpublished by a major business/scientific publishing house, some 8 months after the paper edition).
Meanwhile, Andrew Wylie is really annoying the paper publishing world by putting out ebook editions of current authors’ backlist titles while publishers still have rights to these titles on paper. What makes it worse for so many people is that these editions will be sold only through one retailer – the 800-pound gorilla of the book business, Amazon. This, unfortunately in my opinion, seems to be the way that the world is going generally – a diminution of choice, and the whittling down of the “free market” to a monopoly (or a duopoly in some cases). Nor does the public as a whole receive any benefit from this consolidation, as they would if the monopoly was publicly owned. But enough of the ranting… Amazon seem determined to kill their own ebook market by discounting paperbacks until they cost less than Amazon’s ebooks (or is this a cunning ploy to cut publishers who charge too much for ebooks off at the knees?). Well, there are other markets for ebooks – Amazon is not the only game in town, and if they keep bullying their suppliers (the publishers), they may find that these suppliers can find other outlets. We will see, but right now they don’t seem keen on keeping the publishing world happy.
Yes, I like Kindle as an application. Don’t see myself ever buying the dedicated device, even with all its advantages, like great battery life and a super screen.
But… Yesterday, I wanted to get something from Amazon using my iPad. Try to sign in, and it rejected my password. I was sure I had it right, but it wouldn’t let me reset, and then it asked me to open a new account. So I did (used the same e-mail address, which was probably a mistake), but then it told me I had no devices registered to the account, so there was no point in my downloading. I didn’t want to deregister my iPad (some purchased material that I’d probably lose if I did), so left it at that. Today, I logged in from my computer, got the book, and put it on my iPad. Presumably the “old” account still works, but I can’t purchase from my iPad. Now it appears I have no history from my computer, having logged in again just now.
This isn’t just Amazon, it’s the whole issue of DRM and how it should be implemented, if at all. While Apple’s iTunes was restrictive in the way you could enjoy music (much less so now than it was, of course), there was always a way you could enjoy the music outside the Apple universe by burning a CD of a playlist. Furthermore, anyone who wanted to use my computer could also listen to the music. With Kindle, it appears that I am now screwed, to coin a phrase. I’ve purchased content, and that content is now probably lost to me if I want to buy anything else. This is not exactly friendly, to put it mildly, and it’s got me thinking about DRM.
As an author and an independent publisher, I should be really behind DRM, shouldn’t I? Well, I’m not. I would hate to think that anyone has lost access to something I’ve produced through no fault of theirs or mine, but simply because the distributor has fouled up on the implementation of the delivery mechanism. And if that means I lose a couple of sales because someone copies and “lends” the book to someone, so be it. If it meant losing a million sales (apparently the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” series has reached 1,000,000), I might feel a little differently – but only a little.
In the meantime, Amazon are definitely not on my list of Best-Loved Organizations.
Lem Fugitt, who is largely responsible for pushing me into buying an iPad (well, Steve Jobs has to take some of the blame, and I must share the remainder) has made an interesting comment on my Facebook page.
This is all to do with Flipboard, a very pretty aggregator service for the iPad that allows you to scrape content from online sources into pages arranged like a magazine. Tap on an article and you get the first paragraph, tap a bit further and you get to the Web site itself, to read the full article. You can post links to the article through Twitter, and indeed, you can add your Twitter and Facebook accounts as feeds to your “personalized” magazine (I remember speaking about this as a concept at a conference in Yokohama some 15 years ago).
The question is, does this constitute “fair use”, or are the users of this service getting something for free (i.e. the ad-free content without the distractions)? I use an ad-blocker on my browser, and I also use the Safari 5 Reader feature a lot. Is this any different?
More on “Should I care about Web piracy?” here…
I’ve only had the beast for a few days, so maybe the question is a little premature, but I think the answer is “probably it will end up being a life-changer”.
Yes, it’s just an overgrown iPod touch. But the iPod touch has been with us for so long now (how many years is so long?) that it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary it really is. Instead of a mass of fiddly little mechanical buttons and modifier (shift, control, alt, etc.) keys to change function, the interface changes shape as required, and you point directly at it. Before I had an iPhone, I had a Nokia – one of the few smartphones (and it wasn’t really that smart) available in Japan at the time. It did a lot, but the integration with the computer was weak. The iPhone actually got me to use my phone as a pocket computer – even a book reader.
So who needs an iPad? I was surprised by the quality of the display for photos. Who needs a digital photo frame? And I “have an app for that”™ for almost all the things I do on a regular basis outside the home (word-processing, spreadsheet, whatever).
But the big thing has been e-books. I have three book readers (all free) on the beast, and I’m impressed by all of them in their different ways.
First, Stanza is very customizable. Pinch and zoom to change text size. Takes ePubs, and it has a wide range of free (and paid) downloads available from inside it.
iBooks – as you might expect from Apple, it has the glitziest interface and is less customizable than Stanza. A little lacking in some areas, but very usable indeed. Allows me to read books that I haven’t bought from Apple, including free ones. Pictures in ebooks work well with this.
And Kindle – which I like much more than I expected now I’m using it on a large screen. The Whispersync technology is very cool, the purchasing from Amazon is dangerously easy, and the display, while undistinguished and not terribly imaginative, is perfectly readable.
I expect to be using the iPad more and more for books – not the books I want to keep, but the ones I want to read once for reference, or just as throwaway light reading. As someone mentioned on the Web the other day, the next rational step is to have a “Buy a paper copy of this book” button that will send a print order to a POD house to have the book shipped to your door in a day or so (with a slight discount as the result of having purchased the ebook copy earlier). I shall be delighted when that comes to pass.
In the meantime, I’d welcome other people’s comments on the ebook readers available on the iPad.
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