WRITERS START TO FIGHT BACK WITH A BIT OF LITERARY FIRE?

Part of the little victory of crowd funding the novel Dragon In The Post this year was also bringing a classic like Fire Bringer back into print availability. Here then is the new cover and back page. I have very serious reservations about Amazon’s Createspace though. Firstly the very carefully designed mechanisms to charge you more for each new ‘package’ and the lack of coordination from design teams too, having to communicate all the time through message centres, meaning errors easily creep in. Far more importantly, unlike any old fashioned publisher, Amazon take no financial risks whatsoever. Meaning that they charge you to publish your book, also taking large percentages if it succeeds, but involving no risk whatsoever if it disappears. They also set the minimum price, which I think should be challenged by monopoly commissions, not least because of Amazon so gloating, when I first contacted them, about putting bookshops like Borders into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. With the dawn of eBooks and the Internet the face of ‘publishing’ changed dramatically and of course if you can build and control the platforms, the mediums of publishing, you also control the methods, the prices and to an extent what is said and produced. To be fair to Amazon they did respond to my complaints and improved their ‘service’ but on the whole it seems to me the emperor’s new clothes of modern ‘democratic publishing’, which means as long as we are giving the execs our money, the cats get fatter and how much do they really care what’s out there? We will see what their distribution is now like but whatever happens it’s a proud moment to have a book that was taken out of print in the UK by Macmillan after 12 successful years available once again, to people now and to future generations too. In that sense all books can always be ‘in print’. Thanks again to friends and readers then who made it all happen, because that’s the dedication in the front of the book too! The paperback of Fire Bringer will be on sale in a few weeks, all ready for Christmas.