Commercial Break

Cowboy Angels has just been published in paperback, retaining the lovely and evocative cover of the trade paperback/hardback. The publishing group (Hachette Livre UK) that owns the imprint that publishes my stuff (Gollancz) is currently in dispute with amazon.co.uk because the latter want to keep an even higher percentage of the retail price. I’m on the side of my publisher on this one: all publishers have already shaved their margins to the bone, major retailers like Amazon already get more than 50% of the retail price, and cutting the percentage the publishers make on the sale of each book even further would ultimately cut the diversity of titles they could publish. Amazon has been removing sales buttons from some Hachette titles and ‘delinking’ some titles from features like ‘Perfect Partner’ but so far Cowboy Angels hasn’t been affected by these strong-arm tactics. Like many authors I use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com by default to point you to where you can buy my stuff online, but there are plenty of other places, such as the Guardian shop (the Guardian just gave the paperback a nice capsule review).

Over at Locus, Graham Sleight reviews all eight titles of Gollancz’s ‘Future Classics’ series, including Fairyland. That particular edition has gone out of print and because the lovely, prizewinning covers are very expensive to produce, none of the titles in the series will be reprinted. Which nicely but unfortunately illustrates my point about publishers’ margins . . . Although Fairyland is no longer available at Amazon, some bookshops still have a few copies, and I hope to have some good news about a new edition soon.