Review of The Depths of Deception: now 10 5-star reviews

"I found this to be one of the most remarkable books I've ever had the pleasure of reading"

America has disappeared some years ago. A neo-fascist Party has come to power in the UK. China is on the rise.
A submarine hurtles through the cold dark waters of the Atlantic en route to an unknown destination. Only the ship’s doctor knows its true mission, but he is not who he appears to be.

A sweeping tale moving from the violent heart of Apartheid South Africa, to the ruins of the United Kingdom, and down to the edge of the world in the frozen Antarctic landscape, The Depths of Deception is a tale of revenge, served as a shatteringly cold dish.

"Prepare to feast on this scrumptious word meal! If this novel could be described as a cut of beef, then The Depths of Deception would be Prime Rib or better still Filet Mignon!"

Reviews for The Depths of Deception: Here

Congratulations on the reviews and good luck with your book.

Thank you, and the same to you - although it looks like you have a lot more books out there than I have I'm currently busy writing & trying to get more onto the digital shelves...

Good luck with the books, Ian! Yes, adding to your digital books is the way to go!

I haven't had much success with digital - either writing for it or getting sales. I'm stuck in three print Works In Progress - and stuck is really stuck.

Congratulations Ian. I haven't used digital and can't comment.

Thanks all. I kind of have one foot in traditional publishing (been published by Penguin Books way back) and another in the digital arena. I have a NY literary agent I'm slowly convincing to work back to front: one of my best selling books ('Deception') is one he turned down initially, and now he's pitching it around, based on the reviews and sales on Kindle.

Of course it means I'm totally conflicted as I come near to having two new novels ready, as to whether to 'waste' the time passing them to the Agent first, or putting them directly on Kindle.

We've chatted about this, will probably put the shorter one on Kindle and offer him the longer one - as I move into editing a third completed (very large) novel. I write fairly fast, I normally take longer to edit than to write the initial works. But I put in roughly 7 hour days, seven days a week on writing, so that's a lot of time.

I still think the traditional agent to publisher route is the best if you can get it...

Maybe, DK, but ereader owners are changing the publishing paradigm. They want cheap books that are professionally edited. They don't seem to mind if the authors are well known or not. They want strong storylines with few or no typos and grammatical errors. Unfortunately, meeting their demands takes away most, if not all, of the self-publishers profit since a professional editor can cost more than the self-pubisher earns back in royalties. These are interesting times!

I think you're ahead of the curve, Shelagh. The traditional publishers still sell the majority of books, print or ebook, just by virture of their notoriety and advertising clout. They have their controls on the market for books (Walmart, Target, grocery stores, big box stores, etc.)

The time you speak of is coming. It's already here for a select few or for those with a name or celebrity. For the unknown author, the challenges of promoting an ebook are daunting. Some manage it well; but their biggest thrill still comes from "getting picked up" by a major who sees their phenom in sales. Just as Amazon.com is cherry picking, the majors will do that for awhile too.

There will always be a select few. If you join the Kindleboards forum, you will meet many authors who are picking up thousands of dollars in royalties every month. They are not making the kind of sales that Amanda Hocking or John Locke make, and they cannot afford to write full time. But they have seen slow sales gradually snowball and start to make regular sales. There is a process you have to follow to build up a readership. Anyone can do it and that's the difference between now and then. In the past, POD books were too expensive making it virtually impossible to gain readers. Now, ebooks can be given away or sold for 99c, which makes it possible to reach readers who will then buy books priced higher if they enjoyed reading an author's cheaper books. The opportunities are here now and you should be part of it!

I put two links on Lyn's thread on the Kindle board that you should check out.

Thanks for the additional info. Guess I'm still a bit traditional; but I'm open....

For what its worth, I'd go with traditional if I wasn't experimenting with the e-publishing... I'm trying to do both, while acutely aware of not wanting to be one of those 'vanity publishers,' or one of the deluded souls with a rotten book full of typos and bad grammar, insisting their work is perfect.

I'm old school in some ways, and having previously been traditionally published, I like the formal process and the credibility one gains...

At the same time, as Shelagh said, there seems to be something of a revolution quietly occurring with the ability to self publish.

The whole situation causes conflicted feelings in me. I wrote about it a while back, in a rambling blog post, titled Caves of Self Published Trolls

EDIT: For a glimpse of my own fiction, here's a novella of mine up at a literary magazine, The Utopian: Pigman's Fingers

Excellent blog post, Ian. There is a catch twenty-two in the world of self-publishing POD books: without all the poorly edited books, self-publishing companies would not exist; they rely on a throughput of new authors to sustain their businesses.

This problem is exacerbated by the ease at which anyone can upload a file for conversion to ePub format and put on sale. Readers are feeling overwhelmed by the number of choices. They want some way of filtering out the good books from the rest. They complain about the difficulty of finding the gems yet admit that they cannot resist a bargain!

As an example of how readers respond to price, the exchange rate for the dollar over recent weeks forced Amazon to change all 99c books on the UK site to be increased from 71p to 86p. Readers responded by buying fewer books at the new price. My short stories book was among a group of free short stories that all returned to 71p within a period of a few days. I kept a check on the sales rankings of these books to see how my book compared. All the books continued to make sales at the 71p price. When the sales of my book dropped with the increase in price, so did the sales of the similarly priced books that I'd been wtaching. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for readers to come to terms with the higher price (even just 15p!) and start buying again.