I started taking orders for THE SHRINKER on Friday, but that meant posting the page on the Bear Alley Books blog last thing on Thursday night and the first order came in at 1:13 in the morning. That's quick off the blocks for any of my books!
That said, sales have been a bit slow, which I kind of expected — the people who aren't booking their holidays are on their holidays and in August / September will be paying off their credit cards. This is what you get for launching a book in the week schools break up for the summer. It was unavoidable.
That said, sales are chugging along at around the same rate as PHANTOM PATROL and I've had to renew the license on that as the first run sold out, so let's hope that THE SHRINKER also sells steadily over the next few months.
One silver lining to a slow roll-out is that I can keep up with processing orders and feeding them through to the printers. I'm pleased to say that the first tranch of orders were printed and posted out a couple of days ago, and there has been at least one foreign sale that has been fulfilled and is on its way to Greece.
In the meantime, I'm working on the next project, which will be a pair of books, although likely to be published in the same way that I published EAGLES OVER THE WESTERN FRONT many years ago and MYTEK THE MIGHTY last year, which is to say there will be a gap between the release of volumes one and two. Again, I'm aware that everyone is going to be paying off their holiday bills for the next few months, but I don't want to delay the books when the books might be fighting other books/presents for consideration on the run-up to Christmas.
As it's a pair of books I'm writing two introductions, one to introduce the character and one to follow that character's history through comics. For a subject I thought I knew like the back of my hand, I've had to do a surprising amount of research just to make sure I'm not repeating the wrong information, so the process is taking longer than I had hoped.
One problem I've faced is various aches and pains in my shoulders and neck, caused a little by gardening (I'm trying to cut back some overgrown tree branches and therefore using muscles that I probably haven't used for five or six years) and being hunched over the computer for hours at a time. This heat isn't helping and we've had about three minutes of rain since late June.
To try and solve the problem, I've started taking proper breaks, sitting away from the computer and reading for twenty or thirty minutes. This has definitely helped — I'm not getting any twinges as I'm typing this — and has sped up my reading dramatically. I've managed to read six books over the past two months and I'm a book and a half into the next batch of "to be read" titles (almost a novel and just over half a short story collection).
You can see from the photo that I'm counting a book I read that I reviewed here recently, The Art of Reginald Heade Volume 3, and a Norman Thellwell collection that I've somehow never seen before.
On the short story front, Hospital Station is the first collection of James White's Sector General stories. I had this on the shelf and was prompted to read it by the announcement that Gollancz's SF Masterworks is reprinting two omnibus volumes of that series, Beginning Operations and Alien Emergencies, but at a whopping £16.99 per volume for a 500 plus change page paperback.
That's surely way above inflation rise in the cost of these books. I have (in fact I'm reading) Time is the Fire by Connie Willis from 2013, and that's £8.99 for about 475 pages. The Best of Roger Zelazny from ten years later (2023) is 485 pages, priced £12.99. Now we have a similar-sized book for £16.99, three years later.
The Bank of England's inflation calculator estimates that an £8.99 book in 2013 would now cost £12.99, a 44.5% increase at an annual inflation of 2.78%. So we should be looking at four pounds cheaper. If you do the same calculation for the 2023 price, it shows an increase to £13.99 (a 7.7% change on inflation of 2.19%). So the price increase since 2023 is four times the inflation rate.
Sales might be down for books, but it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy that book sales will continue to fall if they're priced out of reach of the average consumer.
I paid £10.99 for Cross Marks the Spot by James Ronald. It's a small press reprint of an old crime novel from the 1930s, and I already had an American edition of the book (it was reprinted as The Frightened Girl by Michael Crombie, one of Ronald's pen-names), but it was abridged, so I took the opportunity of getting free postage on my order and — thanks to some complex maths on the back of a fag packet — the book actually only cost me £5.99.
It's the first book to feature a grouchy, pushy, argumentative journalist called Julius Mendoza. I read a couple of novellas featuring Mendoza in the pages of The Thriller, and became a bit of a Ronald fan. I've picked up four or five of his books since, but Moonstone have now re-released all of his crime novels, often with a couple of additional stories in each volume. The characters (a beautiful but struggling actress, her bombastic, jobless boyfriend, her drunken actor-friend, the wicked film director, a film company boss struggling to keep costs down, etc.) are only what you would expect from this kind of novel; the locked-room murder mystery element is flawed; but Mendoza is a compelling character and the writing is still very readable — not always true of books approaching their century.
Mick Herron is also very readable. I tend to scorch through his novels, of which this is the sixth in his Slow Horses series. There's a new season of the Slow Horses TV series due in September which will cover books six and seven in one series, so I need to read both before watching the show. (Book seven is, in fact, the book I've almost finished!) There's a lot more foreshadowing in the last few books, setting up situations for future novels, and the whole series feels more interlinked than ever. Both Joe Country and Slough House end on twists that play out in the subsequent episode and I find myself desperate to know what happens next but at the same time knowing that I only have two more novels to go (Bad Actors, Clown Town) that I need to slow down or risk running out.
Talking of books that end of a cliff-hanger, I'm not sure anyone has matched AE van Vogt in the compelling final line stakes as that of The Weapon Makers: "This much we have learned. Here is the race that shall rule the sevagram." What? What???? Was there ever a novel that begged harder for a sequel and didn't get one?
We have our fridge and a small freezer in there as there's no space for either in the kitchen, and both were struggling badly in the heat and we had a couple of bottles of milk go off. Well, we were looking for a sensible solution and found it a couple of weeks ago: camouflage netting!
My mum recently had a blind fitted over a skylight at a cost of about £200. A camouflage net about 2 1/2 x 4 metres cost us £26 including delivery. We had some wooden trellises that had been discarded when a new fence was put up, so we lay the net over the roof and it is now held down by two lightweight wooden frames. The drop in temperature has been astonishing. Admittedly this isn't going to be the solution for everyone's problems when it come to the heatwaves we've been having, but if you're looking for something cheap and cheerful to keep the sun out...
Hopefully by this time next week everyone who has ordered a copy of THE SHRINKER will have received their copies. I'll be ordering copies so that I can list the book on my Ebay store. They should be here shortly, but until then I'm still offering a discount for orders that arrive before the end of next week. Here's where you can order your copy.
