Covers, copyright and Charleston

With Burke and the War of 1812 just three weeks from publication, there are all sorts of bits and pieces to talk about this week, so please bear with me.

First up, for anyone who has missed it so far, here’s the cover:

The fort is a generic example of the period, as imagined by my cover designer. It’s not Fort Detroit, which features in the story, but there were plenty of other forts attacked during the war and I’m happy to go with this one. If you’re interested, this is a contemporary picture of Fort Detroit.

I’m excited about this book. It’s the eighth in the series and, although all the books seem to sell reasonably well and James Burke definitely has his fans, Burke is unknown outside of a small number of Napoleonic fiction aficionados. Perhaps the current issues between the United States and Canada will give the book a contemporary relevance that might bring it to a wider audience. That’s the hope, anyway. As ever, that means I need all the reviews and recommendations I can get, so if you read and enjoy the book, please tell all your friends. It takes quite a long time to research and write one of these and I’m getting lazier as I get older, so if I don’t get a reasonable audience, it’s going to be a long time before we see more adventures of James Burke.

Copyright theft

Anybody who starts writing fiction for money is living in a fantasy world. A very small number of writers earn substantial amounts of money from it. Most writers – even serious writers with agents and publishers – struggle to make four figures from their books.

It’s always irritating when people copy online works without paying for them but, given that writers aren’t basically in it for the money and some people might honestly struggle to buy as many books as they would like, there are more irritating things going on in the world. (That said, there are such things as libraries – which do pay authors – and if you can afford to buy a coffee, you can buy an e-book.) What goes beyond irritating into spectacularly annoying is when Mark Zuckerberg (estimated worth $200 billion) steals books to train Meta’s AI because he clearly thinks that copyright law does not apply to him.

EIGHT of my books appear on a list of works that have been stolen by Meta and I am not happy about it. I’ve joined the Authors Guild letter campaign about this. If any of your books have been stolen, I suggest you do too. Here’s the link: Send a Letter to AI Companies Telling Them They Do Not Have the Right to Use Your Work

Audiobooks

Some more positive technology news comes courtesy of Amazon. In the United States (not yet in the UK, unfortunately) they are trialling the idea of using AI to turn Kindle books into audiobooks. Unlike Meta, they do ask if you would like them to do this and, more importantly, if anybody listens to the resulting work, you get paid. I’ve signed up Something Wicked to see how it goes. Because it’s not available here, I haven’t actually been able to hear it. If you do, please let me know what you think.

It’s obviously unlikely that it will be as good as a professionally narrated book, although it may compare well with my own efforts with Dark Magic. If you want to judge for yourself, the audio book of Dark Magic is available on Spotify, Amazon and elsewhere. The advantage of AI computer generated narration is, of course, cost. It takes a long time to read a book out loud and professional voice actors obviously expect to be paid professional rates and, on the sales that my books generate, that just doesn’t make economic sense. If Amazon’s experiment means that I can break into the growing audiobook market, it’s got to be worth my while.

Fun times

In between preparing for the launch of Burke and the War of 1812, my beloved and I have been getting out and about to greet the Spring. Last weekend we went to Liverpool for a conference to celebrate 100 years of Art Deco. We were staying in a hotel that started life as Liverpool airport, back when flying was luxurious and fun. The hotel lovingly recreates the world of the 1920s, only with air conditioning. The people who went to the conference were lovingly recreating the style and dances of the time too.

What ho! What larks!

Till next week. Chin, chin!

Sneak preview of the next Burke book

Every so often I try to improve my mind (and maybe even my writing) by going to an online lecture. I went to one on audiobooks that explained how to make your own recordings. It was interesting and I did give it a go. It was fun and I ended up producing my very own audiobook of Dark Magic.

The lecturer suggested that everybody should read their books aloud as it was the best way of checking that they read well. There’s a lot in that, but it takes a long time.

I’ve taken the advice for the first couple of chapters of the next Burke book, Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras. It is, if you like, one of the final bits of quality control before it is released on the world. (That means we’re very close to publication. You can start getting excited now.)

My reading is quite flat. I’m not sure it’s up to audiobook quality, but here it is. A sneak preview of the opening of my next book in a convenient audio format.

Let me know what you think. If you like it and you get in touch, I can send you a Spotify voucher for a free copy of the Dark Magic audio book.

Something New for Something Wicked

Something a bit different this week.

During lockdown I home recorded Dark Magic as an audiobook. (You can buy it on Audible, Google Play and other outlets.) It was fun to do and, though sales could be counted on the fingers of one hand, it cost me nothing and during lockdown I had lots of time to experiment with new things.

After lockdown I arranged a better setup and wondered about recording Something Wicked. Something Wicked is quite a lot longer than Dark Magic and there were more demands on my time, so I never finished it. I wasn’t that happy with my first efforts anyway.

Something Wicked has been brought to the front of my mind this week because I’m going to Brompton Cemetery (where a lot of the story is set) to sell copies at their Christmas Fair on Saturday (3 December). That made me get out some of my first attempts at recording the story. If you click on the audio below, you should be able to hear the first 20 minutes. What do you think? Should I try again?

If you like the story and want to know what happens, you can always buy the book. Here’s the link: https://mybook.to/Something_Wicked.