Get “Fatal Forgery” for free!

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Amazon, book group, Fatal Forgery, free download, KDP, Samuel Plank

In the middle of all the other crazy things on the news, I think the strangest fact I have learned this week is that one of the current bestselling books on Amazon is “The Eyes of Darkness” by Dean Koontz.  It’s about a mother trying to find her son in a world devastated by a virus called Wuhan-400.  Now I don’t really care whether Mr Koontz is in fact a soothsayer – what surprises me is that people want to sit in their homes, under lock-down, and read about a fictional pandemic.  Perhaps the Koontz story ends well and readers take comfort from that – but I’ll never know because even if it were the last book on earth, I would not want to read a book about a pandemic.  No, I’m escapism all the way: for me, one of the true miracles of reading is that it can transport me to places and times and situations that I could never experience in reality.

I assume that lots of other people feel the same way as I do and are looking to fiction to take them out of themselves.  And to help with this, I have decided to offer the e-book of my first Sam Plank book – “Fatal Forgery” – free on Amazon until the end of Thursday.  (I would do it for longer, but I sell my Sam e-books through KDP Select – i.e. they’re available exclusively on Amazon, and I get a higher royalty rate because of this.  And one of the rules of KDP Select is that you can offer a free download promotion for only five days out of every ninety.  It’s a commercial decision: if I give my books away for free, Amazon makes no commission on the download.  Entirely understandable, but I thought I would explain why it’s a time-limited free download offer.)

So if you would like to download the e-book of “Fatal Forgery” for free, please do so.  (That’s an international Amazon link, so should take you automatically to the correct Amazon site.)  I can guarantee that the plot is entirely free of any mention of plague, pestilence, pandemic, virus or pox.  And please share this offer with friends and family – the more the merrier.  Perhaps you’re setting up a virtual book group, and a free download for everyone would be a great way to start.  I hope you like the book – and if you do, perhaps you would consider leaving a little review on Amazon.  So get downloading, everyone, and happy reading!

The book-buyer’s marketplace

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book group, bookshop, e-book, library, marketing, paperback, pricing, sales, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, selling

Whenever I give talks about writing – and I’ve spoken in libraries and bookshops, and to book groups, WI meetings and the Rotary Club – people are always fascinated to know about the economics of self-publishing.  Telling them how much it costs to self-publish – nothing! – always surprises them.  (Of course writing a book costs a great deal in time, and you might well choose to spend money on professional editing services, or a cover designer, or a pretty template for the layout of the interior, but you can actually upload a book to a self-publishing service for no payment at all.)  But what really surprises them is how little of the purchase price eventually makes its way back to the author.

If I sell a paperback via Amazon – cover prices are £7.99 and £8.99 for the Sam books – I eventually get about £1.30 of that sale.  If I supply bookshops directly – which entails me ordering the books myself and then selling them on to the bookshop – I get about 50p per book in the end (and, in one case, I am actually subsidising a bookshop because I think it’s the right thing to do, and I lose about 20p per copy that they take…).  And if I sell an e-book – Amazon lists them for about £3.10 – I eventually get about £1.10.  I’m not eyeing up that retirement villa just yet!

And a very interesting article on this subject – where to buy your books in order to best benefit the author – has appeared on the website of the Society of Authors.  It’s a very illuminating read and, as you might imagine, flies the flag for independent bookshops and local libraries.  If you have any choice at all in how you consume your reading material, it’s well worth having a read – some of the observations will surprise you.  (Although much of it is concerned with traditionally published books – they talk of buying in bulk from distributors, which is obviously only a pipe dream for the self-published – it is still useful to have the marketplace dissected in this way.)  Click here for the article.

Martha’s American fans

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book group, Fatal Forgery, Martha Plank, OLLI, review, Samuel Plank, U3A, William Wilson

About a month ago, a retired high school teacher from America contacted me by email, saying that she teaches four groups a course called “History Through Mystery” [how much do you want to go on that course – me too] through an organisation called the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes.  OLLIs offer courses and activities for older people through US universities – it sounds a bit like the UK’s University of the Third Age.  Anyway, this lady said that in June her four groups would be discussing “Fatal Forgery” because it “definitely evokes the feeling of the time without being tedious”.  I was thrilled to hear this, as you can imagine, and gladly supplied some background information, as the novel has no author notes, which reading groups like these days.  And then I waited nervously – it’s quite something to know that lots of well-informed, well-read people are discussing your novel.

And true to her word, this lovely lady emailed me again a couple of days ago, to say that the last of the four groups had just finished with Sam.  And their verdict?  “In every group, it has been one of the most favorite books.  Everyone loved your writing style and found that it was not only easy to read, but it draws the reader into the time period.  Yes, we all wanted more Martha, and a number of members have already read the next two Plank books (as have I) in which there is more Martha.  What a wonderful character.  She is such a great complement to Sam, and he is able to bounce ideas off her and get some very intelligent response.  The other thing which was appreciated is how you triangulated the narrator (Plank, Wilson and Martha) in order to give us a very complete picture of what was going on.”

As you can imagine, Sam and I – and especially Martha – are beaming.  He even says that he might be willing to overlook that little dust-up we all had in the 1770s, given the civilised nature of the resulting population.