Okay, I got good news and I got bad news. First the bad news: this is going to be my last blog post until I’m ready (or almost ready) to publish my next book, or rather the first book of an as of yet unknown and unnamed writer who also happens to be me. However, and that’s the good news, that’s hopefully going to be pretty soon. I don’t want to ( Read more... )

Some seven or eight years ago, in a previous iteration of my existence on the interwebs, I was once chastised - vilified even - for the heinous act of assuming a second identity under a different name. In hindsight, the fake outrage my multiple personalities sparked in a particular niche of Japanese teen idols makes even less sense today than they ( Read more... )

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This Sunday, a group that calls itself Authors United (although, evidently, all authors are not united in this matter - they're not speaking for me anyways), takes out a $104,000 ad in the New York Times in which some 900 authors ask their readers to write to Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos and ask him to stop being a big bad bully and stop hurting authors ( Read more... )

This post was inspired by Douglas Coupland's latest column on ft.com, titled The Ones That Got Away. In it, Coupland reminisces about some of the brilliant, ingenius ideas he’s had over the years, ideas that have since changed the world as we knew it - except he had nothing to do with the fact that these ideas became really big. He just had them at ( Read more... )

Just a quick and dirty little news update, because I've been too busy with work this week to come up with a proper blog post.

First off, if you're in the U.S. and an Amazon customer, you can now read my debut novel Idolism on Kindle Unlimited. Awesome, huh? Yeah, well, I don't know. I'm still waiting for that huge download surge. I'm sure it starts ( Read more... )

Earlier this week, Amazon has launched Kindle Unlimited. Widely described as a “Netflix for books”, Kindle Unlimited allows you to read as many ebooks (or listen to as many audiobooks) as you like for a flat fee of $9.99 a month. It’s basically the same service that has been offered by Scribd and Oyster for a while now, so it’s nothing ( Read more... )

I come from a generation (the last generation probably) that unlike young people today didn’t grow up using keyboards for the majority of their writing tasks. Although I got a good old-fashioned typewriter when I was eight years old, and my first computer (a C64) when I was fourteen, I never used either device more than an hour or two a day. Okay, ( Read more... )

A lot has been said and written in recent weeks and months about the ongoing dispute between Amazon, the largest online retailer for books, and Hachette, one of the "Big Five" publishing houses in the United States. If you haven't heard about it, then it's probably because you're not involved in the publishing business in any way, shape, or form ( Read more... )

Okay, since I don't know what else to talk about today, I've decided it's time to count my blessings and have a look at the book reviews I've received for my debut novel so far.
As of today, I'm looking at a total of seven reviews, two of them between December 2013 and February 2014 when the book still went by the rather bulky title And a Child Will ( Read more... )