EDIT: I’m leaving this up to explain the delay, but as of today, 12 June, Burke in the Land of Silver is available on pre-order at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08B3S36X6. Publication date is next Friday 19 June.
Just a very quick post on why you can’t pre-order Burke in the Land of Silver today.
Burke in the Land of Silver was published last year by Endeavour Press (now Lume Books). Endeavour published my three Burke books and the John Williamson Chronicles. They are still publishing the John Williamson Chronicles (indeed, they’ve suggested they’ll be pushing them more this year) but they decided that they were not making enough money out of Burke to justify publishing the next two. They generously agreed to give me the rights back so that I could re-publish the three existing books ahead of putting out two new ones later this year.
There is one word being changed in Burke in the Land of Silver (kudos to the reader who spotted it and told me so I could fix it), so I was able to move very quickly on this one. I got a wonderful new cover designed by Dave Slaney (who is a fabulous cover designer) and got advice on sprucing up keywords and descriptions on Amazon so it would feature more in reader searches. I also decided to put up the price. (Sorry about that, but £2.99 for over 100,000 words of carefully researched historical novel is more than reasonable.) And, only a few weeks after Endeavour had handed back the rights and the book was no longer available on Kindle, I was all set to re-launch Burke in the Land of Silver on the world. I scheduled the cover reveal and supportive friends (thank you all) agreed to write about it and I pressed the button to send my typescript off to Amazon with two weeks allocated to pre-order so that I could tweak anything that didn’t look right once the whole thing was live.
And that’s when it all went wrong.
Amazon’s robots read my text and said it was the same as an existing Kindle text. (The one that has been taken down but which is presumably still available in their computer memory.) Amazon wrote to me requesting that I prove I had the right to publish it and I replied immediately with a copy of my letter from Endeavour/Lume. But while computers work 24/7 (I got the note from Amazon on Friday evening), the humans that deal with this sort of thing don’t. So here we are, on Tuesday morning, and my book still isn’t available and I’m waiting on Amazon to sort it out.
So you are all (I hope) admiring my cover and people are reading about how they should be rushing out and buying (or at least ordering) Burke in the Land of Silver and the book isn’t on Amazon at all.
Sorry.
Hopefully this will be sorted out very soon. Meanwhile, please be patient. It’s a good book and worth waiting a few more days for.
It’s here! The beautiful new cover for Burke in the Land of Silver.
Ahead of the publication of two new James Burke stories later this year, I’m republishing the existing three. First out of the blocks is Burke in the Land of Silver which is publishing on 19 June and is open for pre-order now.
Covers of historical novels are always a sore point with writers. The traditional publishing model means that authors have little, if any, control over the covers, which often have historically inappropriate images. (Accent Press was a brilliant exception to this rule.) Self-publishing means that I have control over the cover design and I love the job David Slaney has done here.
The story is set in Argentina and the knife shown is a typical gaucho knife which I bought in Buenos Aires. The beautiful hilt is rather more decorative than most working gauchos (cowboys) would carry, but the weapon is pretty much what Burke would have met in his adventures. Gauchos typically carried knives and were prepared to use them. It was a culture of machismo and knife fights were not unusual.
The map of South America dates from 1797.
The musket is French and from an image sourced by Paul Bennett.
I know a lot of people who read this blog are also writers. If any of them want to commission covers from Dave Slaney (who also did the cover for Dark Magic) you can contact him at daveslaney8@hotmail.com.
I had hoped to give you a link to pre-order the book, but (after about a year getting the world-wide rights back) Amazon have just given me another hoop to jump through. Burke in the Land of Silver should, despite this, be available to pre-order in the next few days. Check back here for details.
Conveniently, I’ve just installed an exciting new button on this page. If you click the green button at the bottom left of the screen (or on the pop-up) you should get automatically notified of new posts, so you’ll get news of how to buy Burke in the Land of Silver just as soon as I publish the details.
My son is an officer in the Royal Logistic Corps, so dinnertime conversation has been known to turn to military logistics. This means that I can now tell you much more than most people about how to ship military equipment from England to Afghanistan, but this doesn’t help that much when writing about the movement of men and supplies in historical campaigns.
I thought it might be interesting to look at how logistics operated in the days before the AN-124 Ruslan, the world’s biggest military transport aircraft. As you don’t want an enormously long essay (and I don’t have time to write one) I’ll touch briefly on the ancient Persians and Alexander the Great, before talking about the logistics of the Roman Empire.
Persia
There must have been a time when wars were simply skirmishes between different tribes fighting over land on the boundaries of their territories. Logistics then would not have been an issue. As soon, though, as we have states moving against other states some distance from their borders, the whole question of supplies becomes crucial.
Herodotus recounts how, in the sixth century BCE, Cambyses, the second Persian King of Kings, moved to attack Ethiopia without making proper provision for supplies.
“Angered … he at once began his march against Ethiopia, without any orders for the provision of supplies, and without for a moment considering the fact that he was to take his men to the ends of the earth. He lost his wits completely… They had not, however, covered a fifth of the distance [to Ethiopia], when everything in the nature of provisions gave out, and the men were forced to eat the pack animals until they, too, were all gone. If Cambyses, when he saw what the situation was, had changed his mind and returned to his base, he would, in spite of his original error, have shown some sense; but as it was, he paid not least attention to what was happening and continued his advance. She troops kept themselves alight by eating green-stuff so long as there was any to be had in the country, but once they had reached the desert, some of them were reduced to the dreadful expedient of cannibalism. One man in ten was chosen by lot to be the victim. This was too much even for Cambyses; when it was reported to him, he abandoned the expedition, marched back, and arrived at Thebes with greatly reduced numbers.”
It’s probably significant that Herodotus says that “he lost his wits completely”. The Persian (Achaemenid) Empire was huge and Herodotus must have understood that proper arrangements for supplies was absolutely crucial to military operations on the scale that Cambyses would have undertaken.
Alexander the Great
The Persian Empire collapsed eventually, and, in time, we had Alexander the Great (356 BCE – 323 BCE). He inherited the logistical reforms of his father, Philip, who had been the first general to use horses, rather than oxen, for carrying supplies, which allowed supplies to be moved much faster, easing mobility problems. Philip had also improved the mobility and flexibility of his armies by increasing the supplies carried by individual troops themselves.
Alexander the Great (British Museum)
Alexander developed the organisation of the baggage train, appointing an officer – the Skoidos – to be responsible for everything from the defence of the train to the distribution of supplies. As he moved further east, he also supplemented the horses and mules of his baggage train with camels, which could carry substantially heavier loads as well as being able to cope better with arid terrain. There’s a fair bit of speculation in our understanding of Alexander’s logistics, though.
But then the Romans arrived on the scene and, being Roman, left quite a bit in the way of accounts.
Rome
The Roman army was huge. Some people attribute the fall of Rome to the costs of maintaining it. And while in the early days soldiers were expected to supply their own kit, as time passed, the Roman military became almost entirely funded by the state. They needed arms and armour, building materials and medical supplies, but most of all they needed feeding. A legion is estimated to have required, for example, 18,000 pounds (8200 kg) of grain every day.
Rome could be required to supply the armies’ needs, even though they might be based thousands of miles away. To give just one recorded example, in 215 CE, the commanders of the army in Spain informed the Senate of a shortage of money, clothing and corn. They said they would try to get money themselves, presumably from local taxation, but clothing and corn had to be delivered from Italy. The Senate agreed that these demands were justified and enough corn to feed the army had to be shipped from Italy to Spain. This sort of thing happens all the time. Sometimes shipping was arranged by private contractors and other times the Roman Navy was used. Corn would be shipped from provinces all over the Empire to provision the armies. (Obviously the grain was not always shipped via Rome.)
It’s important to note that the army had to request the Senate for approval for this corn to be bought. The Senate jealously guarded its right to control military appropriations and hence ensure that the army was controlled by the legislature and not the other way round.
The Romans had a substantial logistical capability within each army, which would have a large detachment of mules together with drivers and sometimes wagons. A legion should have 600 – 1,200 mules. If there was a shortage of pack animals, carriages or manpower, the military could requisition from the local population. (Hence Christ saying in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain’ – a reference to the idea that a Roman soldier could demand a civilian in an occupied country should carry his pack for a distance.)
Each Roman soldier was supposed to set off with a week of food on his person and the baggage train would carry a further 3 – 4 weeks’ worth of supplies. If Roman rule had been established in an area, the army would have built (or requisitioned) granaries to hold supplies of grain with supply depots linked along a system of military roads to provide for all the units in the country.
The ability of Rome to maintain lines of supply across the Empire, not only enabling the legions to campaign effectively in hostile countries but also to maintain standing armies in pacified provinces, was essential to the success of the Empire. When the cost of such a vast military network meant that the system collapsed under its own weight, it was centuries before logistical supply on a similar scale was be contemplated again.
Next week I will be revealing the new cover for Burke in the Land of Silver, which is being republished ahead of the release of two new Burke books later this year.
It’s a lovely image and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you.
In our fast-paced world the conveyer belt of online bookshops zooms by at the speed of light. We writers and our books may only have one chance to catch a reader’s eye and make a good first impression. Browsing is not what it used to be. Readers don’t hang about in bookshops, sieving at their leisure through tomes of leather-bound sameness to discover the literary treasures that hide inside. They don’t pause by every volume, pull it out, blow off the cobwebs and read the first chapter to see if the story is to their liking. Those days are gone. Nowadays, our book’s debut on the literary catwalk may be no more than a flash of pixels, a click of a button, or a slip of a finger on the keyboard.
We have entered the era of fast food not only for our bodies but also for our minds. Book covers amount to the virtual sugar coating designed to whet readers’ appetites. The attraction to our book has to be generated before our potential reader contemplates reading the blurb on the back cover or on the Amazon web page. We have one shot at getting it right.
Our publishers and graphic designers rely on us to come up with ideas for the cover. We know our books intimately. If anyone can describe our books in one word – or in one image – it is us. When contriving a cover for our books we look for a symbolic expression that will best represent our book. We can’t go too far or too deep into the story. We don’t want to retell it on the cover, or even summarise it in wide strokes. A good book cover will only just hint at what is to come when the book is opened and read.
Below are three brilliant examples of conceptual book cover designs. The matchstick-house of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine hints at a burnout, at several false starts – prematurely extinguished, at an existence unfulfilled, at loneliness and emptiness. Slaughterhouse Five delivers an ingenious image of an alarm clock with missing hands and two unexploded bombs waiting to be struck – the time has come to an end and history has stopped in its tracks. The symbolism on the cover of Atwood’s The Testaments is effortless because we are already familiar with The Handmaid’s Tale, and what that lampshade-shaped wimple stands for. Colour is drained away from the woman’s face – she doesn’t need a face to express her feelings, she’s not allowed to feel.
Not all covers represent books using highly conceptualised symbolism. Different genres abide by different rules. Romance frequently features idyllic watercolours with flawless silhouettes of romantic heroines and heroes that melt your heart at first sight. Horror covers do the opposite – they make your blood run cold.
Below are examples of historical fiction covers. Again, apart from the obvious symbolism of 12 Years a Slave, they bear stylised references to the eras and locations the books are set in: The Interpretation of Murder in turn-of-the-century Manhattan, New York, and The Innocent in Cold-War Berlin. The reader is given a clear message: this is your destination if you choose to journey into this story.
Crime fiction covers are the least predictable or standardised. There are only so many ways in which one can depict death. Crime fiction goes for diverse ways of intriguing the reader without betraying any of the plot. My new DI Marsh mystery, due to be published in October, features a grand old public-school edifice as its focal point. That’s because all the roads – or, as in this story, all the clues – lead to that school. Even the sky plays its part to perfection: the clouds are gathering and darkening the horizon. There lurks the present and imminent danger. The book cover is an invitation to come in and play with that danger.
When a body is found in the grounds of a prestigious Wiltshire private school, DI Gillian Marsh takes on the case. The young groundsman, Bradley Watson, has been shot dead, pierced through the heart with an arrow.
As the investigation gathers pace, DI Marsh is frustrated to find the Whalehurst staff and students united in silence. This scandal must not taint their reputation. But when Gillian discovers pictures of missing Whalehurst pupil, fifteen-year-old Rachel Snyder, on Bradley’s dead body – photos taken on the night she disappeared, and he was murdered – the link between the two is undeniable.
But what is Whalehurst refusing to reveal? And does Gillian have what it takes to bring about justice?
Anna Legat is a Wiltshire-based author, best known for her DI Gillian Marsh murder mystery series. A globe-trotter and Jack-of-all-trades, Anna has been an attorney, legal adviser, a silver-service waitress, a school teacher and a librarian. She read law at the University of South Africa and Warsaw University, then gained teaching qualifications in New Zealand. She has lived in far-flung places all over the world where she delighted in people-watching and collecting precious life experiences for her stories. Anna writes, reads, lives and breathes books and can no longer tell the difference between fact and fiction.
I’ve enjoyed work by Jasper Fforde before, so I was delighted when I got a copy of his latest, ‘The Constant Rabbit’ through NetGalley.
How to begin to talk about this joyfully eccentric work? I suppose the most important thing to say is that I absolutely loved it. Beyond that, it’s difficult to say anything that will sound remotely coherent to anyone who isn’t familiar with Fforde’s particular style of outlandish humour. This is a book set in a world populated, alongside humans, by anthropomorphic rabbits. The story is told by Peter Knox, who had met a rabbit, Connie, at university and fallen deeply in love. Not that his love was consummated or even, as far as he knew, requited. But when Connie turns up at the library where he volunteers for the six minutes it is open every fortnight, he wonders if he might ever be able to rekindle their relationship.
Things look up for Peter when Connie moves in to the house opposite. There are problems though. Connie, it turns out, is married and her husband, Major Rabbit, is a military veteran and crack shot. Peter earns his living working for RabCoT, the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce. RabCoT is part of the government response to the Event, when anthropomorphic rabbits first appeared. It is fair to say that the government’s prime objective is not to improve life for rabbits. Since the electoral success of UKARP, fiercely anti-rabbit, RabCoT has been enforcing increasingly restrictive rules governing rabbits’ opportunities in human society. RabCoT is aided in this by anthropomorphic foxes, created by the same Event. It is fair to say that Fforde does not view the foxes sympathetically.
Will Peter’s love ever be reciprocated? Will Connie’s husband demand satisfaction in a duel? (With pistols: notions of honour are very traditional in the rabbit community.) Will RabCoT succeed in rounding up all the rabbits to work in a MegaWarren, specially built on the Welsh borders?
It’s a surprisingly gripping story. There is rather more violence and rather less sex than you might expect in a story about rabbits, but there are fascinating details about Peter Lorre (who played Ugarte in Casablanca and had bulging eyes), the car driven by Jake and Elwood in The Blues Brothers (a 1974 Dodge Monaco), and the name of the character played by Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children (Roberta but known as Bobby). If random side-tracks like this are not for you, you probably should avoid this book. It even has footnotes (with more than a nod to Terry Pratchett).
Is this just random silliness, or is there a point to it all? The library that is open for six minutes every fortnight should give you a clue: “the UKARP Government’s much-vaunted Rural Library Strategic Vision Action Group had kept libraries open as to per their election manifesto, but reduced the librarian staffing levels in Herefordshire to a single, solitary example working on greatly reduced hours – which meant that each of the county’s twelve libraries could be open for precisely six minutes every two weeks.” Yes, we are maybe talking satire here. Maybe satire drives the whole story. Fforde gives us a further clue:
“The Event does have all the trappings of satire” I said, “although somewhat clumsy in execution.”
I’d say ‘unsubtle’ rather than clumsy, but given that we live in an age where we have a Prime Minister whose response to national disaster is to quote Latin very badly at bemused audiences, I think the time for subtle satire has long since passed. And if unsubtle satire suits you (think Spitting Image with less sympathy for the establishment and more furry animals), then this will suit you very well indeed.
It races on like a bunny in a marathon (yes, there is) and may sometimes get carried away with its own exuberance (there are what look suspiciously like traces of an entire sub-plot that has been excised leaving just some odd, unexplained details) but it holds together surprisingly well. I found the ending both unexpected and satisfying. And it has the advantage that, quite apart from the satire, it is genuinely laugh out loud funny.
