A new release just in time for the holidays: The Spiked Death

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Cora

Tomorrow (well, technically today) is Christmas Eve and in the next three days, plenty of people all over the world will be unwrapping brand-new e-readers under their Christmas trees. And of course, those e-readers will need to be filled with books.

So, just in time for the rumoured Christmas e-book rush, we at Pegasus Pulp are proud to present you The Spiked Death, the third story about the Silencer, a 1930s style pulp hero.

The Spiked Death All Constance Allen wanted was to dance with her fiancé at the annual charity ball for police widows and orphans. But when your fiancé is Richard Blakemore, the man hiding behind the steel mask of the mysterious vigilante only known as the Silencer, even such simple wishes are often thwarted. And so Constance finds herself stood up at the ball, while Richard is out hunting Baron Tormento, a villain who terrorizes the city and blackmails powerful men – by torturing young girls to death.
At first, it’s just another case for the Silencer, albeit a particularly grisly one. But it quickly gets personal, when Richard’s friend police captain Justin O’Grady is kidnapped. And before the night is over, Constance finds herself facing Baron Tormento’s spikes of death…

For more information visit the dedicated The Spiked Death page.

Buy it now for the low price of 2.99 USD or EUR, 1.99 GBP at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Italy, Amazon Spain, DriveThruFiction, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books and XinXii.

Happy Holidays from Pegasus Pulp Books!

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Hurray for Luxembourg, Cora looks at e-readers and Barnes & Noble wakes up

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Cora

I found myself at a local branch of the electronics chain Media Markt today. Mostly I was there because my Dad wanted to look at pricey Italian coffeemakers. But I also got a chance to look at the e-readers they had on display.

The display itself wasn’t much, a couple of e-readers on a shelf wedged between tablet PCs and netbooks. I spotted a Kobo and a Sony Reader with a really grisly bright pink casing and a couple of other, lesser known brands. Several of the tablets on display also had the Kindle app pre-installed. What is more, tonight I saw the Kobo reader promoted in a Media Markt TV commercial as well. The market still isn’t great, but e-readers are gaining a little more visibility here in Germany.

Finally, today was also a good news day for European readers and indie writers:

The Bookseller reports that Luxembourg is planning to lower the VAT levied on e-books from its current rate of 15 percent to a significantly lower rate of 3 percent. I’m very surprised that none of the usual suspects like Passive Guy or David Gaughran are commenting on this, because it’s great news for all European readers and for indie publishers, since Amazon Europe is headquartered in Luxembourg and therefore obliged to charge the Luxembourg VAT rate. And a lower VAT rate on e-books in Luxembourg means cheaper e-books for readers and less confusing pricing for indies, since Amazon follows the US practice of adding the VAT to the list price. So hurray for Luxembourg!

ETA: FutureBook has some more on the whole VAT issue, including a proposal to lower the VAT rate on e-books in the UK.

More potential good news: Also according to the Bookseller, Barnes & Noble is planning to bring its e-reader Nook to the UK in the “not too distant future” either as a stand-alone operation or in partnership with Waterstone’s. Now I don’t give a damn about the Nook, but if Barnes & Noble has finally woken up to the fact that there is life outside the US and that it is sentient and able to read and write, then maybe they will finally open their PubIt platform to Non-Americans as well. We can but hope.

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November Sales and why you won’t find Pegasus Pulp e-books in KDP Select

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Cora

First of all, I just noticed that I never posted the November sales figures. Well, they weren’t all that great. The month started out pretty well, but then sales ground to a halt with all of those Amazon promotions over the Thanksgiving weekend (Black Friday, Cyber Monday and all that jazz). Amazon Germany has even been running Cyber Monday three Mondays in a row, which isn’t the idea as far as I understand it. Never mind that the American’s were probably too busy eating turkey to buy e-books. Continue reading →

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Pegasus Pulp E-Books now available at Amazon Italy and Amazon Spain

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Cora

Both indie publishers and readers found a special treat behind the first door of their advent calendars today, because Amazon has opened two more Kindle stores in Spain and Italy respectively.

The most important thing about this announcement is that readers in Spain and Italy (and presumably Andorra, San Marino and the Vatican State, should the Pope experience a hankering for e-books) can now purchase the basic Kindle for 99 Euros and any e-book available in the Kindle store without having to pay the two US-dollar Amazon surcharge. It’s good news for indie publishers as well, because we now earn 70 percent royalties for sales to Spain and Italy (yes, Amazon charges international readers more and pays writers less). The 15% VAT rate still applies though for all EU sales.

David Gaughran has a bit more background as well as an outlook what will come next.

Author pages don’t seem to be available at Amazon Spain and Italy yet, but here is the full listing of all available Pegasus Pulp e-books at Amazon Spain and Amazon Italy. I have also added the purchase links for Amazon Italy and Spain to the individual book pages.

I don’t know about Spain, but I know that I have at least one reader in Italy, so this is good news.

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New science fiction short story available: Whaler

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Cora

Even though the last week has been rather chaotic, I have a new short story available.

It’s the first science fiction story published under the Pegasus Pulp imprint and represents my take on a genre trope I really can’t stand, namely the sweet and sappy space whale story. So while my story features a space whale, this one is anything but sweet and sappy and in need of rescuing.

So, without further ado, I present you: Whaler

Whaler The premature explosion of a rocket harpoon fatally damages the spaceship Starbuck III, a whaling vessel dedicated to hunting the giant space whales Balaenoptera Tregannae. But was the explosion an accident or sabotage?
One of the few survivors is Billy Baddoff, crewman second class. Only the luck of a low cabin number saved him from certain death in the vacuum of space.
Hunting space whales is highly controversial, even though the giant beasts show no signs of intelligence and endanger human space colonies with their relentless appetite for rocks. But though he considers the creatures dangerous pests, Billy had no political motive for signing on aboard the Starbuck III. He only needed a job. Though having his ship blown up underneath him may just harden Billy’s views, provided he makes it off the rapidly failing vessel first…

For more information, see the dedicated Whaler page.

Buy it for the low price of 0.99 USD, GBP or EUR at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, DriveThruFiction, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books and XinXii.

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Why the e-book revolution is still mainly a western phenomenon

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Cora

At the Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing, Mark Williams, one half of the Saffina Desforges writing team, explains why 99 cent e-books often cost considerably more outside the US, namely because of the 15% VAT in the EU and the two US-dollar Amazon surcharge levied on every e-book sale to any country outside its favoured fourteen. And the brand-new Kindles are only available in the US as well And you’re actually relatively well off, if Amazon only charges you two dollars extra for an e-book (including a free e-book), because they don’t serve many country, particularly in Africa and Asia, at all.

I already blogged about the Amazon surcharge a while back and touched upon the problems facing readers in countries not served by Amazon in this post on the main blog, but it really bears repeating: So far, the so-called e-book revolution is mainly a Western phenomenon and likely will remain so for a while, because Amazon is deliberately making it difficult for people in many countries to buy e-books.

Luckily, some of the smaller vendors are more on the ball. This is also why I’d advice any author not just to publish with Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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How SFnal is Spy Fiction?

Posted on November 26, 2011 by Cora

The King of Elfland’s Second Cousin has a very insightful post about the connection between science fiction (and urban fantasy for that matter) and classic spy fiction, which draws on Darko Suvin‘s theory of cognitive estrangement, as outlined in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Some very interesting points there.

Taking a look at my own efforts in the spy fiction genre, The Other Side of the Curtain definitely describes East Germany as an alien world – probably because most of the descriptions draw on my own experiences visiting East Germany in the 1980s and for me an alien world is pretty much what it was. That’s also the reason why I found the “We are one people” proclamations in the changeover year of 1989/1990 so baffling – because East Germany was one of the most alien places I had ever seen at the time, more alien than the US or Singapore let alone other European countries.

Though in the end, I didn’t inject a whole lot of jargon into The Other Side of the Curtain. For while Stasi jargon like IM (short for informal employee) became fairly commonplace in Germany after 1989, I figured an international audience wouldn’t understand these terms without a lot of clumsy explanation. Indeed, I even have Shoushan explain the term “Stasi” to Smith at one point, because I wasn’t sure how well known it was outside Germany.

The still unpublished (because it requires rewriting and additional research) prequel to The Other Side of the Curtain is set in Beirut. There is a third, very short story (which I still haven’t been able to find, probably because I scribbled it during a dull university lecture and it is lost between my lecture notes) featuring an encounter between Shoushan Kariyan and an elevator operator in New York. Both describe places and phenomena that are strange to me.

The Carrie Ragnarok stories (the only one available so far is Shape No. 8, though there will be a second in an upcoming collection) actually are science fiction in many ways, though you wouldn’t be able to tell it from Shape No. 8. Again, we have plenty of exotic locations (including the exclusive Central Park West penthouse inhabited by an eccentric millionaire) and jargon, though I made up most of the jargon Carrie uses from whole cloth. We also have actual science fiction – Carrie gets to fly into space and meets aliens in the adventures that were never published.

Crossposted to my main blog, where you can also find regular updates about my life as well as my thoughts on books, films, television, etc…

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War of the E-Readers – and a juicy German bookselling scandal

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Cora

Apparently, Amazon is getting more aggressive about marketing the new 99 Euro Kindle in Germany. They’re even running TV ads now, something Amazon Germany has never done before, probably because they didn’t need to.

Though maybe Amazon is just trying to compete with the German bookseller chain Weltbild. Weltbild does advertise on TV – their cheap book club picks, mostly. However, of late they have also been pushing their 59.90 Euro colour e-book reader.

The Weltbild reader is forty Euros cheaper than Amazon’s Kindle and it has a colour display. On the other hand, the Weltbild reader has a backlit LCD display, which is more eye-straining than the Kindle‘s e-ink display. And guess which aspect Amazon is stressing in their Kindle TV ads?

However, Weltbild has issues of its own, because even though the company operates its publishing house, bookstore chain and online store at a profit, they are being sold off in a hurry by their owners. The reason for the hurried sale, however, is not the market disruption due to e-books at all.

Rather, Weltbild – like most booksellers – happens to sell erotic fiction, sex manuals, books on occultism, etc… in their online and brick and mortar stores. I bought a (pretty good) Black Lace novel from one of their stores myself. And the fact that Weltbild sells erotica and books on occultism would not bother anybody, if not for one little detail: Weltbild is owned by the Catholic church. Continue reading →

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Why pay good money for something you can do yourself?

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Cora

Today’s big news is that Penguin, one of the so-called “big six” publishers, is launching a self-publishing service called Book Country, which offers authors such services as formatting, conversion, cover design, upload, etc… for the low fee of between 99 and 549 US-dollars plus a significant percentage of the author’s royalties.

My first reaction to reading the Wall Street Journal article was, “Uhm, why would anybody want to sign up for this?” It’s basically paying a lot of money for something that many indie authors already do themselves. Never mind that there are plenty of excellent services available for flat fees that are lower than what Book Country is charging. Joe Konrath has pretty much the same view.

Never mind that the Book Country model isn’t exactly new. Harlequin Horizons, the self-publishing arm of Harlequin, which made waves two years ago, had a very similar model. So does epubli, a self-publishing platform operated by Holtzbrinck, parent company of Pan Macmillan, St Martin’s Press and Tor among other and one of the so-called “big six”. So really, there’s nothing truly new about this.

So the question remains, who would pay for something like Book Country when you can either do it yourself or hire a flat fee service that is probably cheaper than Book Country and keep your royalties?

However, there may be more people than we realize who would sign up for a service like Book Country. In this post, Dean Wesley Smith estimates that 95 percent of writers will never try indie publishing, because they find the prospect too daunting.

I find this depressing, because indie publishing is really not that difficult. Besides, there is a lot of great information out there on pretty much any aspect of electronic self-publishing. It took me less than six months from the first tentative idea that maybe I should give this e-publishing thing a try to publishing my first story.

On a related note, at Paperback Writer, Lynn Viehl has a lovely post about how you should keep trying and if necessarily fake it until you can make it work. Because if you give up, you will never get better and you will never see what you can do. The example in the post relates to a (pretty neat) painting project, but it really applies to any sort of creative work, including writing and yes, indie publishing.

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Two Brief Announcements

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Cora

All Pegasus Pulp e-books are now available in various formats at DriveThruFiction. Check them out, particularly if you’re into RPGs.

Pegasus Pulp fantasy books are now also listed at Paranormal Indies.

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