Adrift on the Sea of Rains is now available on Kindle at both Amazon UK and Amazon US, as well as Amazons in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Buy it here: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it.
The Whippleshield Books website is still in development but should be live some time soon
Praise continues to trickle in for Adrift on the Sea of Rains…
On Twitter, Dave Hutchinson (@HutchinsonDave) tweeted: “I recommend that you beg, steal, borrow (but preferably buy) Adrift on the Sea of Rains by @ian_sales, because it’s a little cracker”, and then added on Facebook, “All people of good intent should read Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales, as I did today. I loved it.”
On Twitter, Martin McGrath (@martinmcgrath) tweeted, “Cracking novella (and appendices)”, and Stuart Wallace (@soapyfrogs) said, “just read and loved ‘Adrift On The Sea Of Rains’ … More please!”
On his blog, Early Days of a Better Nation, Ken MacLeod wrote about alt.fiction and mentioned that Adrift on the Sea of Rains was “very good indeed”.
Robert Day has written a very nice review of it here on LibraryThing, and Cliff Burns has given it a five-star review on Amazon here.
Plans to create an internet Whippleshield empire continue apace. I’m still working on the website, but as soon as it’s up and running I’ll make sure everyone knows. I am also now the proud owner of a copy of Scrivener, and I plan to use that to create EPUB and MOBI editions of Adrift on the Sea of Rains. So expect it to be available for Kindle in a week or so.
Meanwhile, I need to get cracking on with the second book of the Apollo Quartet, Wave Fronts, in which the first man on Mars investigates the disappearance of Earth’s first exoplanet colony and discovers something which will completely change humanity’s relationship to the universe…
I am, I suspect, like most people: I know that Amazon is a Big Bad Monopoly and famous for screwing over publishers, but, well, the books and DVDs they sell are competitively priced and the service is good and… So I buy from them. I even link books titles on this blog to my Amazon affiliates account – it currently earns me about £15 a year. (To be fair, I have always linked small press books directly to their own site, in order to better support them.) I’ve also tried selling books on Amazon Marketplace, but given that I have to price them so low to get sales, and that Amazon take off around £2.80 in fees, many of them I’ve sold at a loss. And I don’t mean a loss when factoring in their original purchase price. I mean, it cost me more to post the book than I received from the sale. But I didn’t much care – at least the books were no longer cluttering up my house.
But now the shoe is well and truly on the other foot.
Last month, I started up Whippleshield Books, a niche small press to publish literary hard sf. I did it partly to self-publish something I felt I needed more control over than another small press would give me. I also wanted it out quickly, so I could launch it on the back of Rocket Science at Olympus 2012 last weekend. Which I did. It’s called Adrift on the Sea of Rains.
I bought some ISBNs, and I paid to have the book professionally printed by MPG Biddles. Since the book has an ISBN – two, in fact, one for the paperback and one for the limited edition hardback – it appears in Nielsen’s database, and so was picked up by Amazon. Where the two editions were offered for pre-order.
But the product pages on Amazon were very basic, with only title, author, price, artwork, publisher, pagecount and ISBN. I decided to add a blurb and some reviews. I identified myself as the publisher, and filled in the necessary online form. It would take five days to update the product page, I was told. A day or two later, the book could no longer be pre-ordered; it was now marked “unavailable”. Thinking this might have been a consequence of my editing, I contacted Amazon.
They assured me it wasn’t, and said it was simply because they “did not have a relationship with the supplier”. Amazon suggested I join their Amazon Advantage programme. Now, I’d only edited one of the two editions of my book. The other could still be pre-ordered. The whole thing smelled to me, but never mind… I signed up for Amazon Advantage. It costs £23.50 a year. This was much better, I thought. I had much greater control over the product page. For the small annual fee, this seems okay.
Then Amazon ordered a copy of the paperback edition of Adrift on the Sea of Rains, and I discovered things weren’t so good after all.
Amazon take 60% of the retail price. This is non-negotiable. For a £3.99 paperback, this means I earn £1.60 per copy sold. Amazon take £2.39. And they’ll carry as much stock as they think they can sell, which in this case is a single copy.
The paperback of Adrift on the Sea of Rains costs me £1.32 per copy to print (not including one-off set-up costs, or the fixed cost of the ISBN). So that’s 28p profit per copy sold on Amazon. A bit small, but never mind. Except… I have to ship the order. I have to pay for the postage and packing. At the moment, that’s 20p for a padded envelope and 92p postage for second class large letter. My 28p profit has now become 84p lost. If I have to supply single copies to Amazon, then for each copy I will lose £0.84. If they order 100 copies one at a time, I will be £84 out of pocket. I may not be a businessman, but even I can see this is no way to run a business.
It was always my intention to set up a website of my own for Whippleshield Books, and I would sell copies there. But only a microscopic percentage of the people who visit Amazon were likely to visit my site. So selling on Amazon appeared a good move. And so it would have been. If they’d ordered 100 copies from me at £1.60 for stock, I’d have made £28 (less shipping, which would be less than £28). But since I might have to supply each individual order… it’s untenable.
I’m going to withdraw my Whippleshield Books from Amazon. I am going to stop using my Amazon affiliates account (I’ll leave the existing links on this blog; I don’t have time to go back and remove them all). I am going to pull my books from my Amazon Marketplace account. And I will look elsewhere to buy books and DVDs. Even if it costs me more. (That may result in me buying less, which can only be to the good.)
Having said that, I will be providing a Kindle edition of Adrift on the Sea of Rains. I have no choice in that – the platform is popular and it is the easiest way for Kindle owners to purchase the book. I can also make a profit on each sale. And I hope to have the Whippleshield Books website up and running in the two to three weeks.
I did toy with the title “A taste of green cheese”, but fortunately good sense prevailed. Almost. Anyway, you’ve seen a photograph of the boxes containing it, you’ve seen its cover-art, and you’ve even seen the first review ever of it… So I thought I’d give you a little teaser of Adrift on the Sea of Rains. Here are the first three paragraphs (and a relevant picture):
SOME DAYS, WHEN it feels like the end of the world yet again, Colonel Vance Peterson, USAF, goes out onto the surface and gazes up at what they have lost.
In the grey gunpowder dust, he stands in the pose so familiar from televised missions. He leans forward to counterbalance the weight of the PLSS on his back; the A7LB’s inflated bladder pushes his arms out from his sides. And he stares up at that grey-white marble fixed mockingly above the horizon. He listens to the whirr of the pumps, his own breath an amniotic sussurus within the confines of his helmet. The noises reassure him – sound itself he finds comforting in this magnificent desolation.
If he turns about – blurring bootprints which might otherwise last for millennia – he sees the blanket-like folds of mountains, grey upon grey, and a plain of the same lack of colour, all painted with scalpel-edged shadows. Over there, to his right, the scattered descent stages of LM Trucks and Augmented LMs fill the mare; and one, just one, still with its ascent stage. Another, he knows, is nearly twenty years old, a piece of abandoned history; but he does not know which one.
You’ll have to buy the book to read the rest of it. It will be on sale at Eastercon (6 – 9 April) and at alt.fiction (14 – 15 April). And I hope to have a website up within a couple of weeks where it can be purchased direct.
The first review of Adrift on the Sea of Rains is in. Upcoming4.me plainly liked my novella and have been very nice about it here. Needless to say, I’m happy.
So what if I published it myself. At least I did it properly. See:
That’s 100 paperback copies and 100 hardback copies of Whippleshield Books’ first, er, book: Apollo Quartet 1: Adrift on the Sea of Rains. Well, that’s what I ordered. There may be more, and sometimes the printers do over-run. It looks like more. But I won’t know the exact number until I actually count them.
Anyway, I’m really pleased with how it’s come out. Not bad for a first effort. The cover art is actually more effective than I’d expected:
Having said that, I’ve spotted a few things I’m not completely happy with, but… lessons learned. I shall make sure not to make the same mistakes when I come to publish the second book of the Apollo Quartet, Wave Fronts.
For now, I have 75 copies to number and sign before the Eastercon…
Some of you will already be aware of this, but many perhaps won’t. These days, everyone seems to be doing it, though they might call it different things. I mean self-publishing, or so-called “indie” publishing. There are many reasons why an author might choose to publish one of their books themselves. Hoping to sell a million copies of it obviously isn’t one of them. For my part, I didn’t think the “infamous moon base novella” (see numerous mentions on this blog previously) would be accepted by a magazine or small press editor in the form I wanted it to appear. So I decided to publish it myself…
But more than that, I chose to set up an imprint specifically for the type of fiction I think my novella epitomises, and which I felt was not being published elsewhere. And so…
This April, Whippleshield Books will launch its first book, Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales. This 20,000-word novella tells the story of an attempt to return home by a group of military astronauts stranded at a base on the Moon. Described by Adam Roberts, author of By Light Alone, as “written with an expert blend of technical precision, descriptive vividness and emotional penetration”, and by Kim Lakin-Smith, author of Cyber Circus, as “as poignant as it is impeccably researched”, Adrift on the Sea of Rains is the first in a thematic quartet. The remaining three installments will also be published by Whippleshield Books.
Whippleshield Books was founded by Ian Sales in order to focus on a type of science fiction which no one else seems to be publishing – ie, stories of high literary quality with extremely strong scientific and technological content. Whippleshield Books plans to publish some two to three titles a year, as signed limited hardbacks, trade paperbacks and ebooks. Submissions will open in May 2012, but bear in mind the acceptance criteria are extremely high.
Review copies of Adrift on the Sea of Rains as PDF, MOBI or EPUB available on request.
I hope to have a website ready some time in late April / early May where people can buy the book, though copies of the ebook will also be available from other sites. The second book of the Apollo Quartet, Wave Fronts, should be out before the end of the year; and perhaps there’ll be something else available if someone submits something I want to publish.
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 