Mark Anson's Blog: Mark Anson author blog

Help yourself to a free copy, and leave a review!

Below Mercury is also on free promotion, for 10 December only.

Grab your free copy now!

After much editing (especially of the drawings, to get them to look right on Kindle e-ink and Kindle Fires), Acid Sky was uploaded and published yesterday for Amazon Kindle.

Hope that people like it!

Acid Sky

Well, I have been working hard to make the final revisions, but I'm not going to get this into a releasable state until mid-November. My proof readers have come back with their comments, all the drawings are complete, I'm just in that stage where every time I correct an issue I notice two others!

Finally! The full edit of Acid Sky is out with my proof readers for reading, comment and final changes while I finish off the drawings.
Kindle publication date is set as 01 November, and if all goes well the print version will follow in early December.

Below Mercury is on free promotion on Amazon Kindle from Tuesday 24 - Thursday 26 September inclusive. If this is on your to-read list, grab the opportunity to download it for free!

This is last week's delayed promotion; I managed to resolve, or at least investigate, the unusually large file size shown on the Amazon product page. The e-book file size on KDP is still shown as only ~1.4MB, but in what appears to be an undocumented change (or perhaps a trial of a new feature?), the download file provided for Kindle users is larger, and appears to provide much higher resolution images of all the line drawings, especially on Kindle Fires. If this feature is here to stay, it's very good news, as the compressed image files that are optimised for e-ink Kindles now look really great on Kindle Fires.

Due to an unresolved issue, the file size shown for Below Mercury on Amazon has mushroomed to 16MB! I have delayed the promotion while I get this fixed ...

Below Mercury is on free promotion on Amazon Kindle from Tuesday 17 - Thursday 19 September inclusive. If this is on your to-read list, grab the opportunity to download it for free!

I enrolled my current title in Amazon’s Matchbook programme today (won’t be live until October when it launches). I am very supportive of this initiative. If someone has bought one of my books in print, then I am pleased to offer a free Kindle version as well. I did consider the $0.99 charge option, to reflect ‘costs’ but really, what costs are there to distribute a free Kindle copy? I have already picked up one set of royalties. And if by treating my readers well, it encourages them to write more reviews, then that’s got to be a good thing.
I’ll plan on doing the same for the next book.

I uploaded the seven drawings from Below Mercury to the Goodreads site today. You can see some (but not all) of the drawings on the Amazon sites, but they aren't at the best resolution and sometimes disappear from the site, for unknown reasons! The Goodreads site is much better for displaying the drawings, and allows more in the way of caption text, so I will add some of that soon.
I am very tempted to put up some of the drawings for Acid Sky as a trailer/teaser. Maybe I will when it's nearly ready to go.