Judging a Book by its Cover

Despite the old saying;

Never judge a book by its cover

Everybody in the publishing industry seems to agree that readers do judge books by their covers. I’ve heard some writers state that a great cover is just as important as great content, and I know of one writer who hit the number one spot in his category (and retained it) who claims it was all down to the cover art.

As a writer, I like think it should come down to a clever or interesting title and a good product description, but I can’t deny the importance of covers, even if I’d like to.

I’m very happy with the cover for d.evolution. I was lucky enough to find a great image that was exactly what I wanted, and it was available under a creative commons license.

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d.evolution now available

My new novel d.evolution is now available from amazon.com.

d.evolution is a dystopian, time travel story that features sentient code, killer robots, and mankind’s struggle to break free from his own creations.

Read the blurb, first chapter, or head over to amazon and grab a copy.

To celebrate the new book, I’ve made A God-Blasted Land available for free for the next three days (13th to 15th of April).

The Price of Free Ebooks

I recently made my book A God-Blasted Land free for 24 hours on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, to take advantage of the Amazon KDP Select option to run free promotional days for books enrolled in the program, and to get the book onto more reading devices.

Over the course of the day the book was downloaded 280 times, I didn’t do any marketing other than to mention the download on twitter, so to say there is a market for free ebooks is an understatement. It looks like free might be a great way to distribute ebooks, but I’m left asking myself:

How can writers be compensated for writing books if they give them away for free?

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Ebooks: Changing More Than the Royalty Structure

As exciting as the changes taking place in the publishing world are, I think the opportunity ebooks present to do something new is even more exciting.

For the most part ebooks and epublishing is still so new that the majority of authors are duplicating the paper format digitally (and why wouldn’t they – it works) but as people become increasingly comfortable with ebooks, I think we’ll start to see some changes; some innovative souls will play with the format and the possibilities, and they’ll create something new.

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