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Son of Hamas

admin — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 22:19:59 +0000

A runaway bestseller in the U.S., Israel and Germany

“. . .a Le Carréesque thriller wrapped in a spiritual coming-of-age story. . .”
The Wall Street Journal

“. . . reads with the page-turning ease of a great thriller.”
Forbes

“Explosive . . . a story that feels like a long-lost Abrahamic fable that has morphed into contemporary history.
Christian Science Monitor

“. . . more incendiary than any roadside IED”
GQ

Read Chapter One of Son of Hamas »

Listen to Chapter One of Son of Hamas »

Read Son of Hamas in Arabic »

How self publishing came of age

admin — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 23:57:55 +0000

Alison Flood

Guarrdian.co.uk, Friday 24 June 2011

What used to be seen as a last resort is fast becoming the most successful trend in writing. Alison Flood talks to the authors doing it themselves.

Self-publishing looking up ... GP Taylor, who is thinking of returning to being his own publisher. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

GP Taylor is one of self-publishing‘s success stories. The former vicar sold his motorbike to fund the first print run of his children’s novel Shadowmancer; its popularity, driven by the author’s tireless campaigning, led to a publishing deal with Faber & Faber and a career as a New York Times bestselling author. He seemed to have made the transition from amateur to professional without a backward glance – but eight years on, he’s considering going back to self-publishing.

He’s not the only one. With Bowker reporting an “explosive growth” of 169% last month in “non-traditional” publishing, it’s not just vanity projects that are taking the self-publishing route these days. Amazon announced last week that John Locke had sold 1,010,370 Kindle booksusing Kindle Direct Publishing, making him the first self-published author to join the “Kindle Million Club”, alongside the likes of Stieg Larsson and James Patterson. Meanwhile, self-published authors Louise Voss and Mark Edwards currently top Amazon.co.uk’s Kindle bestseller list, and say they’re selling up to 1,900 copies a day of their jointly-written thriller, Catch Your Death. Faulkner award-winning author John Edgar Wideman last year chose to publish his new collection of short stories throughLulu.com; the site, offering authors an 80/20 revenue split, has published over 1.1 million authors to date, adding 20,000 titles to its catalogue a month. Writers around the world are getting their books to readers – and getting paid for it – without a publisher standing in between. Self-publishing, it seems, is becoming respectable.

“I’m a real advocate of self-publishing,” says Taylor, explaining why he’s thinking about going back to self publishing for his new book, an adult crime novel. “With the number of authors out there, I’m just one of many midlist writers. I’m not a celebrity, and book sales are pretty bad at the moment. [But] with self-publishing, it’s a case of if it’s good, people will buy it, and with the internet you can get people to notice it.” And David Moody, who was making a £1,000 a month self-publishing his horror novels until he attracted the attention of film producer Mark Johnson and landed deals with Thomas Dunne Books in the US and Gollancz in the UK, also believes self-publishing is a serious option for new writers. “I’m actually a little miffed that I’m not self-publishing right now! I might even go back to it at a later stage,” he says. “This new route to market is, in my opinion, becoming a viable alternative to the old submission and rejection merry-go-round … it’s undoubtedly easier for writers to get their books out and for readers to find them today than it was just a few years ago. Sites like Lulu and Amazon’s CreateSpace allow them to produce print editions of their books without the hassle of setting up a publishing business and dealing directly with print-on-demand publishers.”

It’s the internet, and the inexorable rise of ebooks, say authors, that have been the game changers. Even JK Rowling has finally bowed to the inevitable, announcing this week that she and her publisher, Bloomsbury, would be launching ebooks on her new website, Pottermore (and not, incidentally, sharing ebook revenues with booksellers). Taylor, meanwhile, is selling more ebooks than paperbacks by six to one. “What’s the point in going to a publisher for them to cream off the profit? You can put an ebook up in a week”.

What’s more, self-published authors can experiment with price, offering books for free online, or for low price points that will entice readers. Moody made a name for himself by giving away his zombie novel Autumn from his website, in the process creating fans who would pay for subsequent novels. Locke’s bestselling Kindle ebooks are all priced at $0.99. “When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an ebook, I thought, if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I’m as good as them,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Rather, they have to prove they are 10 times better than me.”

His website claims that one of his novels is downloaded somewhere in the world every seven seconds, and he’s now written a new Kindle book, How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months. Voss and Edwards are selling Catch Your Death for 95p because, says Voss, “the huge advantage of having priced it really cheaply is that people think, ‘What have I got to lose?” Paranormal romance writer Amanda Hocking, who has now signed a deal reported to be worth more than $2m with St Martin’s, sold her ebooks herself for between $0.99 and $2.99. She’s now sold upwards of a million.

“Ebooks have completely changed self-publishing, forever,” says US author Scott Sigler, who self-published his novel The Rookie (“Star Wars meets The Blindside meets The Godfather”) after his publisher Crown decided it wasn’t for them. “Anyone can make a book and deliver it right to the end audience, without the gatekeepers in place. Some people think that’s bad, that sub-par fiction gets into the market. However, I believe the market takes care of itself. You get bad stories, sure; you had bad stories with small, mid-size and large publishers as well. But, you also get stories that would have been rejected from most publishers, yet resonate with the end reader and sell thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of copies.”

Moody agrees. “Two major developments have had a hugely beneficial impact on self-publishing. Firstly, changes in technology, in particular the adoption of ebooks by the mainstream thanks to Amazon’s Kindle, the iPad, etc,” he says. “If you’re a self-publishing author today, you have a vast audience waiting, and a decent number of professional channels through which you can easily make your work available. I personally know authors who are doing this to great effect – some are making over $10,000 every month! Secondly, the advent of social networking has had an incredible effect.”

Thriller novelist Barry Eisler turned down a reported $500,000 from St Martin’s Press to go his own way. “The key dynamic at work in self-publishing is legacy publishers’ loss of their lock on distribution,” he says. “It used to be that if you wanted to distribute your book in meaningful numbers, you needed a partner with a sales force, and relationships with wholesalers, retailers, and printing presses. Digital has changed that. Before, the question that had to be asked by a would-be self-published author was, ‘How will I distribute?’ It used to be that there was no good answer. Today, digital has definitively answered it. The question for a would-be self-published author now is just, ‘How will I market?’ And that question has a lot of available answers.” Eisler experimented in February by self-publishing short story The Lost Coast for $2.99, a “premium price” for a short story, just to see how it would perform. It’s been earning him around $1,000 a month, he says, “and my latest short story, Paris Is a Bitch, which I self-published in April, is doing even better.”

The thriller author is an interesting case. After turning down the St Martin’s deal to self-publish, he subsequently signed up to a one-book deal with Amazon for a six-figure sum, but will continue to self-publish other titles. The way he explains it, the numbers make sense.

“To understand what the traditional advance really represents, you have to break it down. Start by taking out your agent’s commission: your $500,000 is now $425,000. Then divide that $425,000 over the anticipated life of the contract, which is three years (execution, first hardback publication, second hardback publication, second paperback publication). That’s about $142,000 a year. This is a more realistic way of looking at that $500,000,” he says.

“But there’s more. Some people have mistakenly argued that, for my move to make financial sense, I’ll have to earn $142,000 a year for three years. But this is one time when you don’t want to be comparing apples to apples. Because the question isn’t whether I can make $425,000 in three years in self-publishing; the question is what happens regardless of when I hit that number. What happens whenever I hit that point is that I’ll have ‘beaten’ the contract, and then I’ll go on beating it for the rest of my life. If I don’t earn out the legacy contract, the only money I’ll ever see from it is $142,000 per year for three years. Even if I do earn out, I’ll only see 14.9% of each digital sale thereafter. But once I beat the contract in digital, even if it takes longer than three years, I go on earning 70% of each digital sale forever thereafter. And, as my friend Joe Konrath [another successful self-published author] likes to point out, forever is a long time.”

So why go the Amazon route for one of his books? Because, he says, “Amazon offered me the best of both worlds, legacy and indie. The advance and marketing muscle you (might) get in a legacy contract; the kind of digital royalties, creative control, and time-to-market you get with indie”. So he’s giving up “something like 20% or 30%” of his digital retail channels, but he’s gaining Amazon’s “marketing muscle” – “and if Amazon blows out the marketing for The Detachment, [his current and future self-published books] will benefit enormously”.

Ebooks might have been the game changer for self-publishing, but Amazon has also been a huge enabler. Offering 70% royalties to authors who publish their books on the Kindle and sell them for between £1.49 and £6.99, or 35% royalties for books sold for less than £1.49, the online retailer provides a shop front for thousands of self-published writers, good, bad and ugly.

Voss and Edwards used it to their advantage, listing the full title of their ebook on Amazon as Catch Your Death (for fans of Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson). This catapulted the book to the top of searches – and in fact, says Voss, it was so successful that Amazon decided to remove the “subtitle”, in an attempt to block self-publishers looking to market their work in a similar way. “After four days the subtitle was removed. While this hasn’t affected the book’s ranking at all, it does mark a sea-change in how self-publishers will be able to promote their work in future. Cross-promotion is used by book publishers every day, but despite Amazon’s move we are still at the top of the list,” she says. “I just assumed [the book] would end up as number 37,000 on the Amazon charts. Now, we’ve made the top spot for a fortnight. As far as we know, we’re the first truly independent authors to get two of our books in the UK top five.”

Marketing is a must for self-published authors: there’s an awful lot of material out there to compete with. Eisler has a “pretty strong online presence” through Facebook, Twitter, and his blog, The Heart of the Matter, and a large mailing list – he’s also an established author with a good following. Moody “used to take every opportunity I could to whore my wares”; Sigler promoted his books to his podcast audience.

Design is also important, says Moody. “I think a fundamental key to the success I had with Infected Books was the fact that the books looked professional. Many self-published authors at the time (and still today, I think) seemed to spend months writing their book, then just minutes packaging and marketing it. I took the approach that the look and the branding was as important as the content. I didn’t want anyone to suspect this was just a one-man cottage industry.”

But content, of course, is key. “None of this matters a damn if you can’t deliver the goods. It doesn’t matter how tech savvy you are, or how well you can market, your book has to be readable if you want to survive,” says Moody, admitting that “the ease with which you can self-publish your own work (or set up as a publisher and publish other people’s) has had an unfortunate side-effect, and that’s to hugely increase the amount of poorly produced work which is available”.

Sigler agrees. “Write the best book you can, hire a real editor to make it better. Have it professionally copy-edited to remove typos. Get a real cover artist – if you’re not a professional artist, don’t do your own cover. Get that book into ebook form. Start promoting, and start on your next book. Repeat, repeat, repeat.”

So what does the rise of self-publishing mean for traditional publishers? Nothing good, say authors, unless they wake up to the new world: to the fact that readers want cheap ebooks, quickly, in tandem with print editions. Otherwise, rather than hearing about self-published authors who “make it” by landing a traditional deal, we’ll be hearing about other writers who decide to take a similar route to Eisler’s and go it alone.

“Publishing has always been a quasi-monopoly built on the lock publishers had on paper distribution. Digital distribution has broken that lock, but legacy publishers are still behaving as though they have monopoly power,” believes Eisler. “They’re running their business with two general imperatives in mind: (i) maintain the primacy of paper (in significant part, by delaying the release of digital books and pricing them too high); and (ii) offer punitive financial, creative, and other terms to authors. Or, to put it another way, publishers are currently running their business in a way that punishes both their end-user customers (readers) and their providers (authors). This was sustainable when publishers faced no meaningful competition. They do now, and will have to adapt or die, because yes, more and more authors are eschewing the legacy model in favour of self-publishing and in favour of the emerging Amazon hybrid model.”

Words of caution about the great ebook revolution

admin — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:21:41 +0000

Gideon Spanier

London Evening Standard, 1 Jun 2011

The only way is up? Penguin's surge in ebook sales has been driven in part by the release of new devices.

Sales of ebooks are soaring. Online retailer Amazon.co.uk is selling more than twice as many books on its Kindle device than in hardback. In America, seen as 12 months ahead of the UK, Amazon’s Kindle ebook numbers have overtaken those of hardbacks and paperbacks combined.

HarperCollins boss Victoria Barnsley says her ebook sales are growing “between 5% and 10% week on week”. Meanwhile, Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury‘s ebook revenues in the first three months of this year are close to the whole of last year’s sales.

“2011 will clearly be the year of the ebook,” says Bloomsbury’s founder and chief executive Nigel Newton.

He might be right but a visitor to the recent London Book Fair at Earls Court could be forgiven for not realising.

New digital devices were on display in a far-flung corner at the rear of the exhibition halls and the big publishers’ stalls, piled high with traditional hardbacks, held all the prime positions.

Similarly, at this week’s Hay literary festival, it is physical books, rather than Kindles, that help to pull in crowds.

So experience suggests we should treat the hype about ebooks and apps with a degree of caution.

As Laurence Orbach, boss of Quarto, publisher of practical non-fiction guides, says: “It’s easy, but misguided, to be convinced that printed books will wither away. It won’t happen.”

No one is denying that digital is dramatically changing consumers’ habits – or that physical bookstores are under huge pressure, with both Waterstone’s and Barnes & Noble in the US changing hands in the last fortnight.

But it is a complex picture, starting with the fact that digital sales have been growing at a stellar rate because they have started from a very low base.

Penguin’s ebook sales last year were only 6% of revenues. For Girl With The Dragon Tattoo publisher Quercus, they represented 3%.

Industry estimates suggest ebook sales could be closer to 10% in the UK and 15% in America this year.

Amazon has every interest in trumpeting the success of Kindle books – not least because it wants more consumers to buy its reading device, which now sells for £111 and is widely regarded as the market-leader.

However, some observers argue that ebook-buying is being driven at least in part by the technology itself, with sales rising each time a new device such as the Sony Reader, Kindle, Nook and iPad comes to market.

“A lot of growth has been driven by hardware launches,” admits one publisher. “People buy it, download a few books and then it falls away.”

City broker Numis warned in a recent analysts’ note: “Current expectations may be obscured by the unrepresentative habits of early adopters.” Numis added: “The economics of ebooks are far from certain.”

Indeed, the online market is flooded with free titles that top the Kindle download charts. Even in the paid section of the Kindle bestseller list, the leading titles sell for less than £1 and will not win many awards. That is in contrast to Amazon.co.uk’s main bestseller list, which combines physical and digital books and has more literary merit and higher prices.

Importantly, although Amazon might be selling more ebooks, revenues from print are still likely to be higher. Amazon does not disclose those figures.

HarperCollins’ Barnsley told a recent conference that the value of the UK books market has fallen around 7% this year. “I put this almost entirely down to the sale of ebooks,” she said. “In fact, I think combined sales of ebook and paperback fiction are probably up at a volume level but not at a value level.”

There are some economies of scale with digital but there are also extra costs. Unlike print, ebooks are liable for VAT at 20% and anti-piracy measures are also a burden.

In terms of genre, adult commercial fiction – mainstream crime and romance – is selling best on ebook. Buying habits vary even within a genre. Random House says that two new bestselling novels by Kate Atkinson and Katie Fforde sold “a very creditable” 9% and 10% in ebook respectively. However, another Random House author, Jo Nesbo, sold 35% of his hardback, The Leopard, in ebook.

Initially, ownership of ereaders was skewed towards men – around 80%. But that has been changing as adoption becomes more widespread.

Bloomsbury’s top ebook in the UK in the last year has been Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, which has sold 34,000 copies thanks to the movie starring Julia Roberts, even though the book has been on sale in print for four years.

Readers in their twenties and sixties have been among the most enthusiastic ebook-buyers – to the surprise of some publishers. For the twentysomethings, part of the appeal is the instant gratification of being able to buy immediately, whereas older readers often have time as well as money to read. Research shows ebook-readers buy more titles.

Digital has other advantages. Publishers are suddenly seeing demand from Peru to Indonesia. There is also the opportunity to publish in digital only, as Bloomsbury is doing with its new venture, Bloomsbury Reader, which will sell ebooks by authors who have gone out of print but are still in copyright.

Publishers are offering more than just a replica of the print with ebooks. There are apps, enhanced ebooks with graphics and video, audio books, and so on. Penguin published Stephen Fry‘s The Fry Chronicles in five formats.

But creating an app or enhanced ebook is not risk-free. “No one wants to relive the mistakes of the CD-Rom boom and bust,” warns Barnsley.

Clearly some apps work, particularly factual guides with location-based software, and can be profitable. Restaurant guide Zagat and Random House’s Good Pub Guide are examples.

But Quarto’s Orbach, who has been wary of ebooks, sees apps and websites chiefly as a free marketing tool that can drive consumers to the paid-for physical product. “Few of the hundreds of thousands of apps that are available manage to wash their faces financially,” he says, adding: “With a few exceptions, enhanced ebooks appear to have run out of steam.”

Publishers are still experimenting. Penguin launched a social-networking site for teens, called Spinebreakers, which encourages reading. Similarly, Random House teamed up with teen site stardoll.com to create an online vampire romance story, Mortal Kiss. Digital has now spawned a physical book as well as a clothing range.

That suggests that although digital keeps growing, consumers also value physical goods. As has been said before, the printed product is a great, handheld wireless device.

New Nook could push Barnes & Noble value up

admin — Mon, 23 May 2011 16:29:35 +0000

By Tim Mullaney, Special for USA TODAY

May 23, 2011

Barnes & Noble, Easton Town Center, Columbus, Ohio.

What do media billionaire John Malone and the Nook e-reader have in common? Wall Street is betting that each will help save Barnes & Noble from sinking into irrelevance.

Shares in the nation’s largest traditional bookseller jumped 30% to close at $18.33 on Friday after Malone’s Liberty Media holding company bid $17 a share for the 70% of Barnes & Noble not owned by its chairman, Leonard Riggio. The bid values Barnes & Noble at about $1 billion and comes three months after rival booksellerBorders Group filed for bankruptcy protection.

Barnes & Noble has invested heavily in the Nook, announcing recent enhancements to its Nook Color e-reader that make the device more like Android tablet computers, though with far fewer features and apps.

And on Tuesday, Barnes & Noble plans to introduce a new e-reader, according to a regulatory filing. Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating declined to comment.

The Nook’s potential means that $17 a share is too low a bid, Janney Capital Markets analyst David Strassersaid in a report. “As the undisputed No. 2 player in the e-book industry, with 27-28% market share, future earnings power is significant,” Strasser wrote.

Malone appears to agree. Thursday’s bid by the longtime contrarian investor — whose recent bets on Sirius XM Satellite Radio and DirecTV have proven golden — suggests he thinks the Nook can help Barnes & Noble turn around after losing $14.5 million in the first nine months of its fiscal year.

“We believe e-books may be reaching an inflection point,” Stifel Nicolaus analyst David Schick wrote in a report. That will boost sales of both Nook machines and its electronic books, he said.

The electronic book market is showing increasing signs of overtaking the shrinking market for printed books. No. 1 Amazon.com said last week that sales of its electronic books are now exceeding printed-book sales for the first time. Amazon’s Kindle is the leading e-book reader.

Barnes & Noble put itself up for sale last year after tussling with dissident investor Ron Burkle. A spokesman for Burkle couldn’t be reached for comment on Friday.

Amazon sales of digital books for Kindle overtake print titles for first time

admin — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:43:48 +0000

The Telegraph, Friday, May 20, 2011

Online retail giant Amazon has said that sales of digital books for the Kindle electronic reader have surpassed sales of print books for the first time. Photo: Getty Images

Online retail giant Amazon has said that sales of digital books for the Kindle electronic reader have surpassed sales of print books for the first time.

“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a statement.

“We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly,” Mr Bezos added. “We’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.”

The Seattle, Washington-based Amazon said that since April 1, it was selling 105 Kindle e-books for every 100 print books, hardcover and paperback combined.

The figures referred to the company’s US website, not Amazon.co.uk.

The company said it had sold more than three times as many Kindle books so far in 2011 as it did during the same period last year.

Amazon began selling print books in July 1995 and introduced the Kindle in November 2007.

The US Kindle store offers more than 950,000 books including 109 of the 111 New York Times best sellers.

Amazon does not release sales figures for the Kindle e-reader.

Kindle to generate $5.42 billion for Amazon in 2011

admin — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:55:17 +0000

International Business Times, May 10, 2011

Caris & Co. said Kindle is a multi-billion dollar opportunity for Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). The brokerage said Kindle remains the most compelling eBook device and a material contributor to Amazon’s non-core business growth.

Caris said the depth and breadth of eBooks and other digital content, the installed base of Kindle devices, availability of Kindle Apps, and other parts of the Kindle ecosystem have expanded dramatically since the first device was launched in November 2007, strengthening the overall Kindle ecosystem.

“Since mid-2009, competition in the eBook market has been intensifying but, in our view, Kindle remains the most compelling eBook device and a material contributor to Amazon’s non-core business growth. In our view, in 2011 Kindle can generate revenue in excess of $5.42 billion and $1.21 billion in gross profit; by 2012 we expect at least $7.96 billion in total revenue and $2.00 billion in gross profit,” said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Caris.

Book titles reached 945,026 in May 2011, increasing by 47,000 over April 2011 (5 percent month-over-month increase) and by more than 740,000 since Kindle’s first anniversary.

eBooks with embedded audio and video clips increased by 290 in May 2011 (their 11th month in Kindle Store) and their number reached 600. Magazine titles increased by 8 to 94 while newspaper titles increased by 3 and reached 167. U.S. newspapers’ count was at 81 and international at 86.

Blogs increased to 12,982 in May (up 4 percent month-over-month) from 12,511 in April. After two unusual jumps in November 2010 and January 2011, Kindle accessories decreased noticeably in April. In May, they remained largely flat sequentially, increasing by only 10 to 1,320.

At the same time, the U.K. Kindle Store offered the Kindle Wi-Fi and 3G models for 111 British Pounds and 152 British Pounds, respectively, as well as 681,000 books, 145 newspapers, 70 magazines, 7,700 blogs, and 72 accessories. Launched on April 21, the Kindle Store in Germany offered the Kindle Wi-Fi and 3G models for 139 euros and 189 euros, respectively, as well as 706,000 books, 9 newspapers, 7 magazines, and 27 accessories.

“We think that Kindle not only helps to remove multiple costs and inefficiencies in the traditional book printing and distribution business (e.g. print and fulfillment costs, back order risk, and inventory management) but also increases propensity to buy books/content and other adjacent products due to convenience and 24/7 access,” said Aggarwal.

Aggarwal said Amazon continues to not disclose business metrics for its Kindle franchise and only anecdotal evidence and irregular press releases suggest the magnitude of the Kindle business. Public data for Kindle book or other content sales are scarce too.

According to the data released with the company’s fourth quarter earnings (on January 27), the third-generation Kindle has sold millions of units in the fourth quarter of 2010 and has become the best-selling product in Amazon’s history. It remains the most wished for, the most gifted, and the product with most 5-star reviews on the website. In addition to that, Amazon continues to enjoy phenomenal growth in eBook sales.

In Aggarwal’s view, as the Kindle ecosystem expands, Kindle device users will not only continue buying more eBooks but also subscriptions, accessories, hardware warranties, and eventually use Kindle’s wireless and computing capabilities for other data and content consumption (e.g. pictures, music, videos, email, etc.).

Aggarwal said now that the Kindle App is available on all major computing platforms and portable devices, Amazon’s eBook market has expanded beyond just the Kindle eBook reader.

“Below we present our updated revenue and gross margin assumptions and long-term forecast for Kindle. Currently, our estimates for the $114 Kindle are loosely embedded in our Kindle Wi-Fi estimates but we will update those as we develop more confidence in the drivers of unit shipments for this form factor,” said Aggarwal.

Amazon stock closed Monday’s regular trading up 1.62 percent at $200.80 on the NASDAQ Stock Market, while in after-hours the stock further rose 0.19 percent to $201.19.

NEW RELEASE!

admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:54:11 +0000

Mark Strand is mentioned once in Jules Verne’s timeless classic.

Yet, it was he, not Phileas Fogg, who was the only man in history to rob the Bank of England. But did he?

Who was Mark Strand?

To solve the mystery, you must enter the deadly underworld of Victorian London, peopled with magicians and murderers, rogues and royalty.

Who was Mark Strand?

You are directed to inquire of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective, and his enigmatic companion Rev. Charles Dodgson, aka Alice in Wonderland’s Lewis Carroll.

* * *

I actually wrote this pastiche back in the late 90s, just for fun. I’d never written any fiction before. And I had a ball researching Victorian London, the mysterious Egyptian Hall, Robert Houdin (Houdini’s inspiration), the 19th century underworld, the British penal system, and lock picking and collecting tons of other relatively useless information.

My idea was to write a book that would appeal to just about anyone but would include some kind of encounter with God. That takes place in a visiting room at Newgate Prison. I wanted to present the God I know, not the surfer Jesus in the picture books or the bearded old man touching fingers with Adam, but the gritty, glorious, seductive, warm, righteous, terrifying God who took my place on a Roman cross and stands by my bed, delighting in me even as I sleep.

At the same time, I wanted to reveal another case of the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Many Sherlockian scholars place young Holmes at Christ Church, Oxford in 1872, while others favor Cambridge. If Oxford, it seemed to me that he would naturally gravitate to the Rev. Charles Dodgson who was a don there at that time. What a character! Dodgson, I mean.

Returning from a global circumnavigation in ’96, I stopped in London and took the bus to Christ Church, where a wonderful archivist named Judith Curthoys graciously walked me through the life of Rev. Dodgson. I came away with class lists, photographs, and tons of original material. If you’re reading this, Mrs. Curthoys, I couldn’t have written the book without you.

While Around the World in Eighty Days . . . the Rest of the Story was a toy that filled my evenings for months, I did have a notion to get it published. I am a writer, after all.

One publisher in London liked the manuscript but said I’d have to delete the parts where I explained how a couple of illusions were done. I told him I got the material from Houdin’s autobiography and that the French magician had died in 1871, so it wasn’t like ratting out Siegfried & Roy. But he said that, in addition to Sherlock Holmes pastiches, he published books by magicians who would be put out if he published their secrets in my manuscript. He even said the black-on-black technique was still being used by an illusionist in Vienna. Anyway, I was too stiff-necked to compromise, so the deal went south.

A Canadian publisher was interested but said the novella was too short, that they’d publish it if I added a couple more stories to the mix. So I started another novella, also set in 1872, in which young Holmes solved the mystery of Kaspar Hauser, the feral wunderkind who may well have been the true heir to the German throne. Were that true, it would have altered the course of German unification and changed world history. Alas, I never finished it.

Which brings us to this eBook.

If you’ve read any other articles on this site, you know that I think ePublishing is replacing traditional publishing and why. So I’ve been on a steep learning curve for the past four or five months, learning as much as I could about this new industry.

And despite the fact that Son of Hamas became an international bestseller, I decided to throw in my future lot with the indies (independent publishers).

Et voilà! The first of half a dozen titles that will soon be downloadable on Blackberries, iPads, Nooks, and other electronic readers everywhere.

I hope you’ll risk $2.99 and buy a copy. I think you’ll get a kick out of it.

Most of the criticism so far is that it’s too short, that the reader just gets interested in something and is shuffled off to something else. That’s true. My bad. My only excuse is that I am, by training, a broadcast journalist who still thinks and writes in sound bites (when Tyndale House said they wanted 90,000 words for Son of Hamas, I nearly choked, because this 24,000-word pastiche was the longest piece I’d ever written).

I’m no John Grisham or Tom Clancy. Nonfiction is still what I do best. But a guy’s gotta have a little relaxation, too.

Which reminds me, drop by the Mark Strand website for more Sherlockian fun!

NYT Bestseller Son of Hamas in Paperback & Arabic

admin — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:33:07 +0000

One year after the debut of the controversial bestseller,

Son of Hamas (March 2, 2010, SaltRiver), by Mosab Hassan Yousef, with Ron Brackin, Tyndale House released the long-awaited paperback edition, featuring an updated epilogue that includes the amazing account of Homeland Security’s attempt to deport Mosab as a terrorist.

“That was crazy,” Ron Brackin told reporters. “Mosab is the guy who keeps calling Muhammad a terrorist on international television.

“Last week, we were talking about all the turmoil in the Middle East, and he reminded me of his prediction in 2010 on FOX News that Islam would cease to exist within 10 years. Now, only two years later, Islamic regimes are crumbling faster than the Berlin Wall. Mosab said Islam has survived for fourteen decades only because it’s been crouching inside the high protective walls of ignorance and isolation. But the technical and information revolutions are tearing down those walls. One and a half billion Muslims can find the truth on the Internet at sites like www.thequran.com, in chat rooms and on satellite TV.”

Also on March 1, Son of Hamas became available in Arabic for free download worldwide. Al Hayat (Life) TV is distributing the electronic edition via the Internet on its web site (http://www.hayatv.tv/), Facebook page and through its email list. Al Hayat reaches 95 percent of the Arabic-speaking people of the world and is the first to challenge the deceptions of Islam. It is the most popular Arabic-language, Christian-content channel in the world, regularly reaching between 20 and 50 million Arabic-speaking people.

The Arabic-language download is also available at Tyndale House Publishers (www.tyndale.com).

Son of Hamas received global attention upon its release. In America, it was No. 11 on the New York Times bestselling hardcover, non-fiction list on March 21, 2010, moved into the Top Ten a week later and remained on the list for seven weeks.

Mosab Hassan Yousef was born in Ramallah, in the West Bank in 1978. His father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, is a founding leader of Hamas, a terrorist organization responsible for countless suicide bombings and other deadly attacks against Israel. Yousef was an integral part of the movement, for which he was imprisoned several times by the Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service. He withstood torture in prison only to discover that Hamas was torturing its own people in a relentless search for collaborators. He began to question who his enemies really were—Israel? Hamas? America? After a chance encounter with a British tourist, Yousef started a six-year quest that jeopardized Hamas, endangered his family and threatened his life. He has since become a follower of Jesus Christ and received political asylum in the United States.

For more information, visit www.tyndale.com or www.sonofhamas.com for blog updates. To schedule Mosab Hassan Yousef as a media guest or guest speaker, please visit http://mediacenter.tyndale.com/1_products/details.asp?isbn=978-1-4143-3307-6.

Ron Brackin has traveled extensively in the Middle East as an investigative journalist. He was in the West Bank and Gaza during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, on assignment in Baghdad and Mosul after the fall of Iraq and more recently with the rebels and refugees of Southern Sudan and Darfur. He has contributed articles and columns to many publications, including USA Today and The Washington Times. Ron is the author of other nonfiction books, including Sweet Persecution, Between 2 Fires and Iraq, My Handiwork. He was a broadcast journalist with WTOP-AM, Post-Newsweek’s all-news radio station in Washington D.C. and weekend news anchor on Metromedia’s WASH-FM. And he served as a congressional press secretary under the Reagan Administration.

To schedule Ron Brackin as a guest speaker, contact him directly through his website at www.ronbrackin.com.

Introducing E-Book Best Sellers

admin — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:14:28 +0000

from The New York Times, February 11, 2011

This week’s Book Review introduces revamped best-seller lists, the result of many months of planning, research and design.

On the Web, there are three entirely new lists. One consists of rankings for fiction and nonfiction that combine print and e-book sales; one is limited exclusively to e-book sales for fiction and nonfiction; and the third, Web-only list tracks combined print sales — of both hardcover and paperback editions — for fiction and nonfiction.

All the other lists, though presented in reworked formats, will be familiar to readers. The Book Review’s related columns — TBR: Inside the List, Editors’ Choice and Paperback Row, all written by Book Review editors — remain in their accustomed places in print and online. We continue to offer extended rankings, a full methodology and a list archive online.

As before, The Times’s News Surveys department, which directs the paper’s polling operations, including its political and election polls, will collect and analyze the data reflected in each list.

eBook Trends to Watch for in 2011

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:12:30 +0000

The following articles by Suzanne Fyhrie Parrott will help you step back and envision what may lie ahead for ePublishing. As big as it has become already, we’re still only on the ground floor.

Last year closed with the traditional publishing community on shaky ground.

Book retailers are transforming as many customers go online to purchase. This move has put a lot of pressure on traditional chain stores to create revenue and profits. Similarly, digital books continue to gain market share, and are now “estimated at 8% to10% of revenue fro some major publishing,” as reported by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal.

Borders isn’t the first large retail bookstore struggling with the changing times. In August, Barnes & Noble put itself up for sale, with Borders investor William Ackman offering to “finance a bid for Borders to buy Barnes & Noble for $960 million.”

Borders Holds off on Publisher Payments

Now, as the year comes to a close, Borders announced it was delaying payments to many of its publishers. The long-time concerns about Borders’ financial health is being realized. With a new year dawning, an undisclosed number of Borders publishers will not be paid, and whether they will, in turn, hold off shipments to the retailer is uncertain.

So what does this mean for the epublishing industry? Many self-published authors, such as Joe Konrath, predict 2011 a boom year for e-publishing. In November, Konrath sold 266 self-published print books for combined royalties of $1000, but he sold 300 ebooks per day for combined royalties of $26,000, according to Konrath’s blog.

“I’ve also noted before how ebooks are like a pyramid scheme. Once they’re live, they keep earning money, and more people review them and tell others about them, growing their fanbase. As an author, I add fuel to this fire by writing even more titles, biggering my potential for discovery and for new readers.”

Konrath also reports his new title Shaken, published by Amazon Encore, “puts my self-pubbed sales for November to shame.”

2011 is the year to get published. As the sales of Kindles continue to increase, so will the sale of ebooks. And I predict as the Kindle moves mainstream, expect the price of the Kindle device to drop below $99.

Nearly a month after these comments were published, Parrott gazed deeper into her crystal:

Bundled Books

Some publishers have already experimented with this option. Major e-tailers would offer book bundles to the public for a discount. Bundles could include a bundle of the same book in both print and e-formats; a bundle of an author’s complete library; or a bundle of topic related books.

More Publisher Released eBooks

We will start to see more publishers e-publishing books first as a means to test the market before going to press. This process reduces the risk and possibility of lost revenue. A printed copy will then be produced for those who prefer them, which is still a majority of the market.

Free e-Readers

E-tailers may choose this marketing perk for readers who buy bundles or join e-book clubs. Or they may offer dramatic discounts on ereader devices to entice that last holdouts to try digital reading.

Although public libraries are struggling don’t write them off just yet. Borrowing (or lending) books has always been a low-cost means of acquiring or reading books, and is still part of the avid public-library-users agenda. So expect libraries to adjust to the ever-changing demands and technological advances of digital reading.

Lower Priced e-Readers

The dedicated reader is a commodity, so expect to see e-Readers fall below $100.

Advertising and Marketing

This trend is already starting to rear its head in the digital publishing world. Publishers are experimenting with ways to monetize content by including in-book advertising, sponsored links, subscription delivery and even an all-you-can-read menu option for one set price. Most of the infrastructure is already in place; it is merely a matter of time before someone capitalizes on it.

Social Reading Groups and Book Clubs

The book club will move from the living room to the computer, for social book clubs and discussion groups. I have participated in several, although the flavor and feeling of texting your thoughts was unappealing. Until it moves into a voice discussion group, this aspect will not be on my list of to dos.

Keep up with the latest news on the exploding ePublishiing industry at The Unruly Guides!