Finally, a redesign

I’ve been working on this for more weeks than I care to remember, and now it’s finally complete. No, not yet another new piece of writing, but my web site. I wanted to bring the links to my signed books to the front rather than having them sit on a tab and then all clustered together on one page. Especially now that The Mortality Code is finished at ready to go on sale on 1st March. You can pre-order it by clicking on the link in the right sidebar, though, right now. All pre-orders will ship on 1st March as well.

I’ll not make any excuses for the fact that I don’t have an online shop where you’d be able to order more than one book at a time, and then pay for your whole basket in one go. The truth is that I really don’t want to spend time on wrestling with technology (technology that I am capable of wrestling into submission), but instead get back to what I actually want to do, which is writing. I do find that that the working on web sites and book covers and book layouts and working through spreadsheets looking at pricing points etc etc just leech the joy out of the actual writing and weighing of phrases and sentences and paragraphs.

There’s another reason for this re-design, too. Printing costs went up almost a year ago, postage costs are rising faster than ever (and the Post Office can’t blame the Horizon scandal for that, or perhaps they can), so it was time to look at pricing overall, because anything I’ve sold from here in the last 9 months had been done at a loss. Good job I have a day job, I guess.

So you’ll find that the prices of my signed books has risen slightly, as have the prices on the beast that I am forced to use, for now anyway, to print and distribute unsigned copies. Those of you living outside the UK may find it cheaper to order my books from your local beast sites and asking me nicely to send you a signed book plate you can stick in them. Some of you living in the UK might even decide that’s your best course of action. And again, I make no apologies for this – in common with most independent writers (and traditionally-published mid-list writers) and hybrid authors (trad-published and independent – of which I am fortunate to be one), my writing generates barely enough income to remunerate me for the long hours of solitude spent writing my alternate worlds.

I had thought of headlining this piece with a reformulation of the title of Peter Handke’s great novel Die Angst Des Torwarts Beim Elfmeter (The Fear Of The Goalkeeper At The Penalty Kick), but thought better of it – to compare marketing and web design to goalkeeping would be to drag down the art of being a goalkeeper.