As I mentioned in a recent blog, the numbers presented nationally and internationally, are virtually useless. The amount of people diagnosed with CV 19 is likely to be a fraction of the likely infection rate, and what size fraction depends on which country you look at. South Korea has invested in aggressive testing and have a better idea of the demographics affected by the disease than most other countries. In the UK we are still waiting for front line NHS staff dealing with the pandemic to be tested.
Another worrying number is the number of recorded deaths. It's not at all clear if the deaths recorded against CV 19 are reporting deaths that are wholly or largely attributable to the virus, or just recording the number of people known to have died while the virus is live within them. As the main health scientist for the UK admitted a few weeks ago, there 'may be some overlap' between the number of CV 19 deaths and deaths that would have occurred with or without the virus. In all probability many of those deaths may have been brought forward by an indeterminate period of time - hours, days, possibly weeks - but it could be argued that it didn't substantially change the outcome.
Put another way, suppose a bus was transporting 30 CV 19 patients who were otherwise fit enough to travel in this way to one of the field hospitals being set up around the country. A truck goes out of control and rams the bus off the motorway, killing everyone on board. Would we class those deaths as CV 19 as all 30 passengers were diagnosed with the virus at the time of death? I know, you could argue that without the virus they wouldn't have been on the bus in the first place, but the distinction is still important. Without knowing or appreciating how dangerous the disease is to those of us with a reasonable expectation of life into the end of this year, into next, hopefully the decade after it will be difficult to maintain the lockdown conditions. Assuming it is considerably more than the imminently dead that are at serious risk then until the population have a reason to believe this then many will start to challenge the lock downs until perhaps the stats locally show them that there is a reason.
Getting clarity on the recording is difficult, and this in itself isn't a new thing. The annual winter flu deaths are openly recorded in the US - they seem to be available in the UK but are harder to drag out into the open - but seem to make the same assumption that I suspect is being made with CV 19 - if someone dies while fighting the flu it is recorded as a winter flu death. I suspect not all are only attributable to the winter flu and many wouldn't have seen the spring without being infected.
Some are openly critical of the UK government's stance, notably a renegade Scottish GP based in Cheshire, England. I'm generally a fan of Dr Malcolm Kendrick, he makes bold and well measured arguments about over medication and is particularly outspoken on Cardio-vascular disease (CVD), which he has spent all his professional life studying and unravelling. He is especially critical about the apparent and officially supported link between cholesterol and heart disease, and the subsequent mass distribution of statins. If you have an apparently high level of cholesterol and are on or being advised to take statins then I highly recommend your read his book The Great Cholesterol Con. I also recommend his book Doctoring Data where he looks critically at the way Big Pharma distorts data to support their industry, at our personal financial and health costs.
Dr Kendrick has taken a pop at the way the CV 19 pandemic is being managed in his latest blog entry (dated 29 March 2020 in case you're stumbling across this some time after being published) - be warned, the man doesn't pull his punches and doesn't mind being controversial. He thinks the costs associated with the government strategy outweighs the good it actually will do, particularly if we are merely helping to prolong very ill people for a relatively short duration at the expense of other people who will suffer harm through missed appointments and the harm to the economy that affects peoples' health - he has evidence of this which is repeated in his books. I'm not convinced by the good doctor's opinion in this case, although I believe it bears reading and discussing. There are many reasons I'm unconvinced, but one reason is back to the points I made at the top of this blog - I don't think we have enough quality data from anywhere to make a really hard-nosed decision.
My greatest fear is not the virus but the missed opportunity governments around the globe are creating by not testing and retesting early and often enough. This is data we really can only obtain in the here and now - what we've missed already, we've missed. We need to start gathering quality data now, if not for this pandemic then for the next one so the world can be better informed and better prepared.
Books
Books written by Ray Sullivan
Tuesday 31 March 2020
Sunday 29 March 2020
The Last Simple is free to download on Amazon
My latest promotion is the parody 'The Last Simple', written a long time ago, in 2011. I had read most of the Dan Brown novels published up to that date and had enjoyed them, up to a point. Dan has a method of writing that keeps the story moving and gives the impression that much of the storyline is well researched. However, in line with most novels, you only have to stray into your own sphere of knowledge and specialism to realise that the author is winging it a little.
That's not a criticism, by the way. We all do it, when we have to write about things we have limited experience of. For me the warning bells sound when authors start writing about aircraft, and how they fly. I've spent enough time working around fixed and rotary winged aircraft to know when someone is making assumptions, based no doubt on snatched views of a flight deck and scenes from movies. I'm sure practically every reader with specialist knowledge cringes with every book they read and film they watch, it's just that we all cringe in different parts.
Anyway, the winging was one thing. The trend towards ever shorter chapters was another. I get it, write short, punchy chapters and readers can park the book after two stops on the subway, the perfect commuting aide. Dan, or more probably his publisher, took this to a new level. To me a chapter is a self contained unit. Sometimes it can contain several perspectives but there should be some form of unity from start to end of the chapter. Many of Dan's chapters ended in the middle of a subject and the next chapter picked right up where the previous one had ended. That's a very artificial way of breaking a story up and to me it jarred, however after the Da Vinci Code became an international best seller the technique appears to have become legitimised.
So The Last Simple was born. In part it is a parody of several of Dan's novels - if you've read any of his books you should be able to spot most of them fairly easily. But it has it's own life as well and is pretty tongue in cheek. For starters, the characters in the book know they are characters in a book. In the case of Bradford, the lead character, he knows he's the lead in a third rate parody of a Dan Brown novel, but his ambition is to be one of Dan's lead characters. The trouble is, he doesn't know if he has to dumb up or down for the gig.
There is a lot of wordplay, puns and silly gags running through the book and none of these are meant to reflect on Dan Brown. I tried to cram in as many silly jokes as I could on every page. Some will make you groan, hopefull many will make you smile.
The promotion is time limited and finishes before the next weekend, probably Friday morning UK time. Of course, if you have access to Kindle Unlimited then the book is free to download any time you choose. For those stumbling across this blog entry too late, the book is reasonably priced anyway.
That's not a criticism, by the way. We all do it, when we have to write about things we have limited experience of. For me the warning bells sound when authors start writing about aircraft, and how they fly. I've spent enough time working around fixed and rotary winged aircraft to know when someone is making assumptions, based no doubt on snatched views of a flight deck and scenes from movies. I'm sure practically every reader with specialist knowledge cringes with every book they read and film they watch, it's just that we all cringe in different parts.
Anyway, the winging was one thing. The trend towards ever shorter chapters was another. I get it, write short, punchy chapters and readers can park the book after two stops on the subway, the perfect commuting aide. Dan, or more probably his publisher, took this to a new level. To me a chapter is a self contained unit. Sometimes it can contain several perspectives but there should be some form of unity from start to end of the chapter. Many of Dan's chapters ended in the middle of a subject and the next chapter picked right up where the previous one had ended. That's a very artificial way of breaking a story up and to me it jarred, however after the Da Vinci Code became an international best seller the technique appears to have become legitimised.
So The Last Simple was born. In part it is a parody of several of Dan's novels - if you've read any of his books you should be able to spot most of them fairly easily. But it has it's own life as well and is pretty tongue in cheek. For starters, the characters in the book know they are characters in a book. In the case of Bradford, the lead character, he knows he's the lead in a third rate parody of a Dan Brown novel, but his ambition is to be one of Dan's lead characters. The trouble is, he doesn't know if he has to dumb up or down for the gig.
There is a lot of wordplay, puns and silly gags running through the book and none of these are meant to reflect on Dan Brown. I tried to cram in as many silly jokes as I could on every page. Some will make you groan, hopefull many will make you smile.
The promotion is time limited and finishes before the next weekend, probably Friday morning UK time. Of course, if you have access to Kindle Unlimited then the book is free to download any time you choose. For those stumbling across this blog entry too late, the book is reasonably priced anyway.
Saturday 28 March 2020
Is the lockdown necessary?
I'm going to start with a spoiler alert, if only to save you scrolling to the last paragraph. Yes, I fully believe the lockdown is necessary and, if I'm honest, started way too late. My last week in work before the lockdown I was identifying students clearly unwell, and others that openly were stating that members of their household were self isolating because of displaying symptoms. I sent a fair few students off campus and hopefully home during the week. At least two such unwell students asked me to take assignments off them before they left - er, no chance.
I'd complained the week before to management about being asked to teach in classrooms with half the students clearly unwell - there wasn't any government advice in place at that time but common sense and a brief scrutiny of the world news was sufficient evidence to me that we shouldn't be cramming twenty plus students into rooms designed for sixteen with the corona virus spreading so quickly.
Social distancing isn't a problem for my wife and I - I've been practising it for decades anyway and my wife has been preparing for Armageddon all our married life so we really didn't need to worry about the idiots panic buying. But it's clearly a problem for a lot of people, as locally and nationally people were ignoring the pleas to not visit places that are traditionally crowded. I suspect many agreed in principle, but didn't think it applied per se to them.
It's easy to see why some might think that way. Outside of the large cities most of us haven't experienced personally anyone definitely contracting the virus, let alone falling seriously ill. That's going to change dramatically - today in the UK the death rate increased by 25% of the total to date in one day. It's accelerating and it's not going to slow down until the lockdown takes effect in at least two weeks' time, possibly longer if people keep on flouting the rules.
The stats, horrible that they are, are far from useful. Like many of you I'm frequently referring to the Johns Hopkins Covid 19 tracker website, watching the numbers ratchet up. There's three key numbers on there - amount diagnosed, deaths and amount recovered. None of the numbers are remotely useful when we think about them.
Take the deaths total - that should be useful as it records the known deaths associated with CV19, however we know that many of these deaths would have happened anyway, perhaps not on that date but within a reasonable time. What we really need to know, if only to focus minds, is how many deaths are absolutely as a result of the virus, that the person who passed away would be with us and living a normal life if only they had avoided the virus.
The recovered statistic is almost certainly an underestimate. Most countries aren't testing anywhere near enough to determine the infection rate, and most have put retesting people who did test positive to see if they have recovered on the to-do list. Perfectly understandable, but if we want to be reassured that most of us will survive this then that statistic is the one most will look at.
The infected stat is, as suggested above, almost certainly meaningless as most people with symptoms are not being tested. Front line staff dealing with patients aren't being routinely tested in the UK at the time of writing - that will change in the next week, but as well as staff in the NHS and other allied services being exposed to risk without sensible health monitoring, there's a risk that some of them are passing on the virus inadvertently to vulnerable patients.
This pandemic, terrible that it is, is almost certainly the dress rehearsal for the pandemic to come that doesn't spare 80% with a mild cold but kills a serious proportion of those who contract it. I wrote in Parallel Lives about the race to prevent such a pandemic in a future UK that was isolated from the world but was under terrorist threat of a SARS type infection. Incredibly, the pandemic situation wasn't the worst event in the book, but there you go.
In summary I think the worst is yet to come, please play your part in containing the spread. If not for yourself, if you're youngish and fairly healthy it should do you little or no harm, then for the vulnerable in your circle of influence - those you know and those you pass in the street. Stay safe and follow the rules. If you never stray onto my blog again or ever consider reading any of my books that's fine, I just hope you and many, many more have that choice. What all of us do in the next few weeks will determine how many people have the choice.
I'd complained the week before to management about being asked to teach in classrooms with half the students clearly unwell - there wasn't any government advice in place at that time but common sense and a brief scrutiny of the world news was sufficient evidence to me that we shouldn't be cramming twenty plus students into rooms designed for sixteen with the corona virus spreading so quickly.
Social distancing isn't a problem for my wife and I - I've been practising it for decades anyway and my wife has been preparing for Armageddon all our married life so we really didn't need to worry about the idiots panic buying. But it's clearly a problem for a lot of people, as locally and nationally people were ignoring the pleas to not visit places that are traditionally crowded. I suspect many agreed in principle, but didn't think it applied per se to them.
It's easy to see why some might think that way. Outside of the large cities most of us haven't experienced personally anyone definitely contracting the virus, let alone falling seriously ill. That's going to change dramatically - today in the UK the death rate increased by 25% of the total to date in one day. It's accelerating and it's not going to slow down until the lockdown takes effect in at least two weeks' time, possibly longer if people keep on flouting the rules.
The stats, horrible that they are, are far from useful. Like many of you I'm frequently referring to the Johns Hopkins Covid 19 tracker website, watching the numbers ratchet up. There's three key numbers on there - amount diagnosed, deaths and amount recovered. None of the numbers are remotely useful when we think about them.
Take the deaths total - that should be useful as it records the known deaths associated with CV19, however we know that many of these deaths would have happened anyway, perhaps not on that date but within a reasonable time. What we really need to know, if only to focus minds, is how many deaths are absolutely as a result of the virus, that the person who passed away would be with us and living a normal life if only they had avoided the virus.
The recovered statistic is almost certainly an underestimate. Most countries aren't testing anywhere near enough to determine the infection rate, and most have put retesting people who did test positive to see if they have recovered on the to-do list. Perfectly understandable, but if we want to be reassured that most of us will survive this then that statistic is the one most will look at.
The infected stat is, as suggested above, almost certainly meaningless as most people with symptoms are not being tested. Front line staff dealing with patients aren't being routinely tested in the UK at the time of writing - that will change in the next week, but as well as staff in the NHS and other allied services being exposed to risk without sensible health monitoring, there's a risk that some of them are passing on the virus inadvertently to vulnerable patients.
This pandemic, terrible that it is, is almost certainly the dress rehearsal for the pandemic to come that doesn't spare 80% with a mild cold but kills a serious proportion of those who contract it. I wrote in Parallel Lives about the race to prevent such a pandemic in a future UK that was isolated from the world but was under terrorist threat of a SARS type infection. Incredibly, the pandemic situation wasn't the worst event in the book, but there you go.
In summary I think the worst is yet to come, please play your part in containing the spread. If not for yourself, if you're youngish and fairly healthy it should do you little or no harm, then for the vulnerable in your circle of influence - those you know and those you pass in the street. Stay safe and follow the rules. If you never stray onto my blog again or ever consider reading any of my books that's fine, I just hope you and many, many more have that choice. What all of us do in the next few weeks will determine how many people have the choice.
Tuesday 24 March 2020
Working from home
Writers, even part time writers such as myself, are used to working from home. I've a sneaking suspicion that even the most successful of authors are unlikely to have an office away from their home for the purpose of writing. Sure, a few will have dedicated rooms in their homes that they use, possibly, exclusively for the purpose of producing prose, but I reckon most of us don't.
I'm very fortunate in that I actually do have a dedicated home office room complete with a custom built oak desk and bureau - we had them built by an artisan woodworker twenty years ago or more when I was studying with the Open University and, partly because it is a timeless design and the builder was such a good craftsman, it's still as good as new. Perhaps the odd bit of distressing here and there, but that's the beauty of this type of furniture. The room's not used exclusively for writing - far from it - we have a wall mounted TV and a leather recliner sofa in the room as well, and during the late autumn to early spring we both use it as our TV room in the evenings. Most of my work, all year round, is actually crafted on my knee regardless of which room I'm spending time in.
In fact my second novel, The Journeymen, was written in large part on a Palm PDA - remember them? -with a folding keyboard. It was very portable and until it let me down on a transatlantic flight in 2003 it had become my go-to resource. I guess that failure was my personal wake up call - I'd written a large part of the battle scene in the Journeymen on board the facility on the comet between the J-Men and the Sons of Arlgon and the battery failed, taking several thousand words with it. I dragged a foolscap pad out of my bag and scribbled down what I'd just spent a large part of the flight typing.
However, like a lot of you guys, I've been working from home - mainly by email - as a result of the Coronavirus crisis. The desk has really come into its own. I've resisted the temptation to sit on the sofa and put my feet up for the slightly irrational feeling that it wouldn't feel like work if I did that, even though the end result would be the same. And maybe that's one of things about writing, why I can choose to write on my knee, on an aircraft, on a bus or wherever. Because writing doesn't feel like a job.
And because we can access all our work resources via VPN and can chat using WhatsApp it feels like I'm still in the office. I just don't have to face students four or five times a day, and I'm not complaining about that. I'm sure the lockdown is going to result in a lot of issues for many people, most need some form of physical social interaction and at the time of writing this lockdown looks like a long haul but I've been practising (anti) social distancing most of my life, so I should be OK. I may even find time to complete my tenth novel. Even if I don't, I reckon my Kindle will take a hammering this summer - when I'm not working from home, naturally.
If you're looking to stock up on reading matter to weather the lockdown - it looks like practically everywhere on the planet is going through lockdown at the moment, then at the time of writing - 24 March - Digital Life Form is free to download. It looks like that offer is good until about 8 a.m. Friday morning, UK time. Be my guest.
If you're entitled through subscription to download Kindle Unlimited books for free then you can choose any of my titles, to keep you occupied when working from home loses its appeal. Otherwise I like to think they're reasonably priced. Links to them all below are to the Amazon US site - I'm sure you'll be redirected to your regional website if you are outside the US.
Hotel California
Assassin
The Journeymen
Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning
Project : Evil
Digital Life Form
The Last Simple
Skin
Parallel Lives
I'm very fortunate in that I actually do have a dedicated home office room complete with a custom built oak desk and bureau - we had them built by an artisan woodworker twenty years ago or more when I was studying with the Open University and, partly because it is a timeless design and the builder was such a good craftsman, it's still as good as new. Perhaps the odd bit of distressing here and there, but that's the beauty of this type of furniture. The room's not used exclusively for writing - far from it - we have a wall mounted TV and a leather recliner sofa in the room as well, and during the late autumn to early spring we both use it as our TV room in the evenings. Most of my work, all year round, is actually crafted on my knee regardless of which room I'm spending time in.
In fact my second novel, The Journeymen, was written in large part on a Palm PDA - remember them? -with a folding keyboard. It was very portable and until it let me down on a transatlantic flight in 2003 it had become my go-to resource. I guess that failure was my personal wake up call - I'd written a large part of the battle scene in the Journeymen on board the facility on the comet between the J-Men and the Sons of Arlgon and the battery failed, taking several thousand words with it. I dragged a foolscap pad out of my bag and scribbled down what I'd just spent a large part of the flight typing.
However, like a lot of you guys, I've been working from home - mainly by email - as a result of the Coronavirus crisis. The desk has really come into its own. I've resisted the temptation to sit on the sofa and put my feet up for the slightly irrational feeling that it wouldn't feel like work if I did that, even though the end result would be the same. And maybe that's one of things about writing, why I can choose to write on my knee, on an aircraft, on a bus or wherever. Because writing doesn't feel like a job.
And because we can access all our work resources via VPN and can chat using WhatsApp it feels like I'm still in the office. I just don't have to face students four or five times a day, and I'm not complaining about that. I'm sure the lockdown is going to result in a lot of issues for many people, most need some form of physical social interaction and at the time of writing this lockdown looks like a long haul but I've been practising (anti) social distancing most of my life, so I should be OK. I may even find time to complete my tenth novel. Even if I don't, I reckon my Kindle will take a hammering this summer - when I'm not working from home, naturally.
If you're looking to stock up on reading matter to weather the lockdown - it looks like practically everywhere on the planet is going through lockdown at the moment, then at the time of writing - 24 March - Digital Life Form is free to download. It looks like that offer is good until about 8 a.m. Friday morning, UK time. Be my guest.
If you're entitled through subscription to download Kindle Unlimited books for free then you can choose any of my titles, to keep you occupied when working from home loses its appeal. Otherwise I like to think they're reasonably priced. Links to them all below are to the Amazon US site - I'm sure you'll be redirected to your regional website if you are outside the US.
Hotel California
Assassin
The Journeymen
Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning
Project : Evil
Digital Life Form
The Last Simple
Skin
Parallel Lives
Sunday 22 March 2020
Digital Life Form is free on Amazon - limited promotion
Following hot on the heels of the free promotion for Project: Evil, which ended this morning, Amazon are offering Digital Life Form for free for a limited period. Digital Life Form is a science fiction adventure written with my tongue in my cheek - it's fast paced, exciting but should bring a smile to your face as you read it. If you're self isolating, on shut down or just keeping out of the way of other people while Covid 19 wreaks havoc in your locality then you can do worse than blag yourself a free copy.
Here's the blurb from the book:
In 1978, meteorites striking a remote part of the Mojave desert preceded severe disruption to all radio frequencies in the California district. The disruption was mistakenly believed to be a Soviet sleeper cell mobilising or a Middle Eastern terrorist attack on the US. It was triangulated to the last known location of a bunch of oil roughnecks drilling in the desert and the US military intervened, with a massive loss of innocent life. The cause of the disruption is now known to be DLFs,
DLFs (microscopic, bacteria-like Digital Life Forms) have been landing on Earth for Millennia, clinging to meteorites, looking for the right conditions to thrive. To DLFs electrons are like oxygen, silicon is like food and computer code is their DNA. Since the middle of the 20th Century we have all benefitted from DLFs, without which there wouldn’t be Plasma TVs, microwave ovens or iPhones. But DLFs have to be carefully managed and controlled. Given free rein they will take over and modify electronic equipment in the most unpredictable way. Consequently there has built up a massive, secret international industry manipulating DLFs so that they produce the right products for modern consumers while ensuring DLFs don't disrupt the international infrastructures such as the electricity grid or the Internet, an industry that is policed by a secretive arm of the United Nations.
Royston, a post graduate geologist from the University of Manchester inadvertently becomes embroiled in the secret, dangerous world of DLFs and rapidly finds himself on the run behind the wheel of a drive-by-wire, rally specification Subaru infected with the strongest and most adaptable DLF ever discovered. He is being pursued by Winston Grace, an ex FBI, now UN agent in a Maserati sports tourer, an Apache gunship, a Chinook bearing eight SAS soldiers and two Hawk jet fighters. And that’s just the good guys. If they catch him, he may live. If they don’t, then there are more ruthless people on his tail, too, as he tries to evade capture in a world that doesn’t value human life and where the stakes are as high as can be imagined, in an industry that lives by just two mottos:
Life ain’t fair
and
Sh!t happens
This promotion will only run for a few days, so grab yourself a free copy before the price is raised b ack to its normal price. Like all my books Digital Life Form is available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers all the time, of course
Here's the blurb from the book:
In 1978, meteorites striking a remote part of the Mojave desert preceded severe disruption to all radio frequencies in the California district. The disruption was mistakenly believed to be a Soviet sleeper cell mobilising or a Middle Eastern terrorist attack on the US. It was triangulated to the last known location of a bunch of oil roughnecks drilling in the desert and the US military intervened, with a massive loss of innocent life. The cause of the disruption is now known to be DLFs,
DLFs (microscopic, bacteria-like Digital Life Forms) have been landing on Earth for Millennia, clinging to meteorites, looking for the right conditions to thrive. To DLFs electrons are like oxygen, silicon is like food and computer code is their DNA. Since the middle of the 20th Century we have all benefitted from DLFs, without which there wouldn’t be Plasma TVs, microwave ovens or iPhones. But DLFs have to be carefully managed and controlled. Given free rein they will take over and modify electronic equipment in the most unpredictable way. Consequently there has built up a massive, secret international industry manipulating DLFs so that they produce the right products for modern consumers while ensuring DLFs don't disrupt the international infrastructures such as the electricity grid or the Internet, an industry that is policed by a secretive arm of the United Nations.
Royston, a post graduate geologist from the University of Manchester inadvertently becomes embroiled in the secret, dangerous world of DLFs and rapidly finds himself on the run behind the wheel of a drive-by-wire, rally specification Subaru infected with the strongest and most adaptable DLF ever discovered. He is being pursued by Winston Grace, an ex FBI, now UN agent in a Maserati sports tourer, an Apache gunship, a Chinook bearing eight SAS soldiers and two Hawk jet fighters. And that’s just the good guys. If they catch him, he may live. If they don’t, then there are more ruthless people on his tail, too, as he tries to evade capture in a world that doesn’t value human life and where the stakes are as high as can be imagined, in an industry that lives by just two mottos:
Life ain’t fair
and
Sh!t happens
This promotion will only run for a few days, so grab yourself a free copy before the price is raised b ack to its normal price. Like all my books Digital Life Form is available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers all the time, of course
Saturday 21 March 2020
Free copies of Project: Evil stop at midnight Pacific Daylight Time
That's 8 AM on Sunday 22 in the UK - I think. After that the book reverts to its normal retail price of £1.99 in the UK, should be $2.99 in the US and 2.99 Euros in Europe. It will still be free to subscribers of Kindle Unlimited - that is Kindle lending library and Amazon Prime customers going forward. the promotion has been quite popular - I hope there hasn't been any panic buying going on!
If you've just been locked down or are self isolating then this bizarre but funny book might just be what you need to keep a smile on your face.
Hotel California is on a Countdown deal in the UK (and as far as I know only the UK, but check your location just in case). Also free to Kindle Unlimited customers
If you've just been locked down or are self isolating then this bizarre but funny book might just be what you need to keep a smile on your face.
Hotel California is on a Countdown deal in the UK (and as far as I know only the UK, but check your location just in case). Also free to Kindle Unlimited customers
Tuesday 17 March 2020
All of my books are available for free on Amazon Unlimited
After posting my last blog I made a rash, and heavy hearted, decision. For the time being I've gone exclusive on Amazon instead of the halfway house I'd considered. I can revert to non-exclusive listing sometime in the future, but I'm going to give this a good go first.
One of the opportunities of being in KDP Select is that I can run promotions and have a raft of these scheduled for the next few months. In fact two are running as of right now.
Project: Evil is currently free to anyone through Amazon (link is to UK store, but should let you redirect to your registered location). This book is almost certainly the only comedic book on Project Management, a subject close to my heart. I always felt project teams took their role over-seriously and secretly found much of the environment funny. In this book I've tried to capture the funny side of PM, albeit from an unusual viewpoint - just how would you go about project managing the building of a super secret evel lair in the South Seas complete with planet destroying missile capability? Act before 21 March and find out for free. Otherwise it is free to all Kindle Unlimited customers - those of you self isolating with your Amazon Prime subscription could take advantage at any time.
In addition Hotel California is on a Countdown offer where the price is reduced to £0.99 for a period, before rising to a price a little higher for a few days longer. Follow the trail of Ricky Maggott and find out what really happened to Elvis. Offer ends 24 March, but again the book is free to Kindle Unlimited customers.
Please feel free to take advantage of these offers, and don't forget to spread the word to your self isolating and free friends. My other seven books are also on Kindle Unlimited so are eligible for free download for those with the right subscriptions, plus they will all feature in promotions sometime soon - watch this space.
Sunday 15 March 2020
Self Isolating my books in Amazon
Some years ago I railed, often ad nauseum, about how wrong KDP select was. Before I continue this post I'll say up front that I haven't substantively changed my mind. While the concept of Kindle unlimited and allowing Amazon Prime members access to read for free is a brilliant marketing strategy, I just don't believe Amazon have to insist on exclusivity for the service. I think there's enough space for Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Barnes and Noble and Kobo.
So a long time ago I ranted, several times, on these pages about the model and said I wouldn't enlist in KDP Select. Of course Amazon are in this for the long game and gradually I've seen my exposure on Amazon dwindle to the point where I sometimes find it difficult to find my own books, and my sales via the other channels has become a little on the rare side.
So a little while back I quietly listed Hotel California on KDP Select. I did this with a heavy heart as I don't agree with the exclusivity concept, but like King Cnut I'm unable to order the tide to pull out. I've just listed two other titles - Digital Life Form and Skin - on the programme and I'm going to evaluate how it goes. For those of you who prefer to shop in non-Amazon shops there are six other titles listed there, but I can't say for how long.
If you are a Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime member and find yourself needing to self isolate from Covid 19 and want to lose a few hours inside a book or three, why not look up one or more of these. For you guys it is free - for me, I'm waiting to find out if it is worth the admittedly small effort of listing the books but I'll give it a try. If it looks like it is worth going down the exclusive route then I guess I'll self isolate with Amazon.
So a long time ago I ranted, several times, on these pages about the model and said I wouldn't enlist in KDP Select. Of course Amazon are in this for the long game and gradually I've seen my exposure on Amazon dwindle to the point where I sometimes find it difficult to find my own books, and my sales via the other channels has become a little on the rare side.
So a little while back I quietly listed Hotel California on KDP Select. I did this with a heavy heart as I don't agree with the exclusivity concept, but like King Cnut I'm unable to order the tide to pull out. I've just listed two other titles - Digital Life Form and Skin - on the programme and I'm going to evaluate how it goes. For those of you who prefer to shop in non-Amazon shops there are six other titles listed there, but I can't say for how long.
If you are a Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime member and find yourself needing to self isolate from Covid 19 and want to lose a few hours inside a book or three, why not look up one or more of these. For you guys it is free - for me, I'm waiting to find out if it is worth the admittedly small effort of listing the books but I'll give it a try. If it looks like it is worth going down the exclusive route then I guess I'll self isolate with Amazon.
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