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STOP DEAD HAS BEEN SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEOPLE'S BOOK PRIZE

Please vote for Stop Dead to win The People's Book Prize, where the winner is selected  by readers! Register by entering your email address - nothing more - and you will be emailed a password to use when you vote. It only takes a few seconds.  VOTING ENDS 20th May.  VOTE HERE

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Read the opening:

She dashed across the cold kitchen floor. The sound of his feet pounded in her ears as he raced down the stairs. It wouldn’t be long before he caught up with her. Her thoughts spun wildly. She had to get away. Hide somewhere. Anywhere. As the back door swung shut behind her, the evening air felt cool on her tears. She stared around in terror at the darkness, searching for somewhere to hide. The garden was overgrown with scratchy brambles. Frantically she ran across the weedy lawn, the dry grass prickly beneath her bare feet, forcing her muscles to keep going, faster and faster. Any second now he would emerge through the door behind her.

She darted into the shed. Bent almost double, she struggled to catch her breath. Her chest was burning. Her lungs felt as though they would burst. She was drowning. As her breathing slowed, she became aware that her legs ached painfully from running. They were shaking so violently she could barely stand.

He burst in, slamming the door against the shed wall. With a roar he launched himself at her, dragging her onto the ground. She hit her head as she fell, but she didn’t care. All that mattered was that he was there. She grappled feebly with him, but was no match for his vigorous assault. It was happening again and she was powerless to stop him.

Over his shoulder, through her tears she saw a figure hovering in the doorway, one hand raised in a futile gesture. But there was no point calling out for help. Scrabbling on the ground, her fingers closed on the handle of something very heavy. In that instant, she knew what she had to do. With a surge of adrenaline she raised the hammer as high as she could and swung it down.

BLOGGING

For far too long I've been using my blog simply as a platform to post my news. And you have to agree, there has been a lot of news to post. Yet when this blog first started, over five years ago, my intentions were very different. My original plan was to write a kind of diary of my journey to becoming an author. Along the way I became so busy being an author, that I lost my impetus to blog about it. To report on my journey has begun to resemble a list of boasts - CWA Dagger Award shortlist, accolades in journals as diverse as The Times and Star magazine, on both sides of the Atlantic, voted and selected for Best Fiction lists, hitting Number 1 on kindle and iTunes, and regularly appearing bestseller charts on amazon, Waterstones, WH Smith, amazon... yes, I'm boring myself. So my blog petered out, apart from the occasional interviews with other authors, and sporadic  posts about yet another promotion, special offer, or bestseller list. Only this week, COLD SACRIFICE was a 'Buzz Book' on iTunes, ROAD CLOSED reached the Top 10 on kindle, and DEATH BED was selected for the amazon kindle summer promotion, reaching Number 3 in crime and thrillers.

It's time to get back to the original purpose of this blog, and explore issues concerning the world of publishing, from the perspective of an author. I have no 'inside knowledge' beyond what I can gather from my own experience. So here's where I am right now.

My debut, CUT SHORT, came out in 2009 as an A format paperback - small, cheap, with a monochrome cover. By 2011 my first three titles had all become bestsellers, and my publisher 'branded' the series, bringing out all the titles in the series in B format, with lovely colourful shiny matching covers. You can see them all on my website LEIGH RUSSELL  if you want to see how smart they look. The row of covers on the virtual shelf on my kindle isn't quite the same.

Here's my little bookcase at home, like a trophy case, only hidden away upstairs where no one else can see it, with 15 editions of  my books on display plus three bookmarks. If you look carefully on the extreme left, you can see the eye on the proof copy of the first edition of CUT SHORT is looking in the opposite direction to the one on the spine of the sale copy.

When CUT SHORT was first published, a fellow author advised me to ask my publisher to bring it out as an eBook. Wait for my next statement... I wasn't quite sure what he was talking about! I'd heard talk of 'eBooks' but it was all something of a mystery to me then. Six months later, the eBook duly came out. The same process occurred with ROAD CLOSED. By the time DEAD END was published in 2011, eBooks were firmly on the map. The eBook was available to download on the same day the print book hit the shelves. Meanwhile, sales of eBooks began to overtake the print version. I'll deal with my response to that in another post. DEATH BED was due to be published in 2012. The eBook was released on December 2011, six months ahead of the print book. The same happened withSTOP DEAD, and that pattern seems to be continuing for the time being. I can't say "for the foreseeable future" because things are changing so fast, it's hard to look ahead.

Sales of eBooks are growing. Some statistics cite them as representing 20% of the market in a rapidly growing sector, other sources say they are now at 25% of the market.

In a statement accompanying its fourth quarter and full year results for 2012, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos neatly summed up where he sees the future of book retailing heading–especially for his company. “We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” said Bezos. “After 5 years, eBooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast – up approximately 70% last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5%.”
(US Publishers Weekly, January 2013)

From the perspective of an author, it makes little difference in terms of income. The standard percentage royalties an author earns from sales of eBooks is higher for an author than on print books, as the publisher's overheads are far lower. Certainly the sales on eBooks are potentially huge compared to those of print books. My own books have sold hugely in eformat compared to the sales of my books in print.

Personally I'm in two minds about eBooks. I'm thrilled to be earning a living from my books, if a modest one. But I still love the look and the feel of physical books.

Oh, and the links here are to the eBooks on kindle... but you can find links to the print books as well on my website: WEBSITE

STOP DEAD

STOP DEAD is available to download TODAY. 

Good reviews are starting to come in.  If you have an e-reader you can read it for yourself NOW! 

STOP DEAD ebook 

"She dashed across the cold kitchen floor. The sound of his feet pounded in her ears as he raced down the stairs. It wouldn't be long before he caught up with her."

STOP DEAD

Thanks to Best Crime Books for a fantastic review of Stop Dead "all the things a mystery should be, intriguing, enthralling, tense and utterly absorbing"

Stop Dead - the new Geraldine Steel novel

Here's the cover for the next Geraldine Steel novel, available to download in December, out in print in 2013.