CreateSpace Vs Ingram for Print-on-Demand Distribution

Guest post by Karen Myers, from her original post on Hollowlands.

Note: The following observations reflect Karen's personal understanding of the differences between the two services, based on her own and others’ observations. They do not include private information received from any of the vendors involved.

INGRAM
The largest worldwide distributor of print books. When a bookstore orders a book, it probably comes from Ingram (perhaps through an intermediary).


Ingram offers two services for publishers: Lightning Source International (LSI) and IngramSpark. The former is for “real” publishers and was all they offered until a couple of years ago. Its contracts are daunting, its interface is a bit clumsy, and its communications are a bit slow and sometimes cryptic (especially to indie publishers who aren’t familiar with publishing industry terms). Indie publishers and others lamented, and Ingram offered a new service, Spark, with a friendlier front end and slightly more restricted discounting terms. They stopped letting most indies into LSI once Spark was launched (I got into LSI just in time). Both systems, I understand, use the same back ends and services — the only difference seems to be that there are fewer discount terms on Spark, and the front end/customer service is easier for the newbie. Ingram will charge you for returns, an area that terrorizes new indie publishers because they don’t know what to expect. (These days, it seems to be pretty harmless, now that bookstores have adopted just-in-time ordering practices instead of ordering in bulk and returning leftovers.)

CREATESPACE

CreateSpace (CS) is owned by Amazon and intended for indie publishers. It’s very user friendly, with good customer service. It had a fee per book, just like Ingram, but then dropped that altogether. It lets you use a CS ISBN if you don’t have one of your own. (Ingram requires you to have your own ISBNs, like a “real” publisher). In fact, it requires a CS ISBN for the Library portion of its expanded distribution service, presumably due to its relationship with Baker & Taylor.

There are two basic levels of CS distribution: Amazon-related, and expanded. The Amazon-related is closely tied to the KDP program, so linking your ebook and your CS POD book is very easy. CS also offers a webstore, for what that’s worth (I’ve never sold a book there).



The first Expanded service compares directly to Ingram.

Buying a print book from Amazon

Here’s how it works under the covers, as far as I and others can tell…

When Amazon receives an order for your POD book, and finds you only available via Ingram, the buyer can receive a “there will be a delay” message from Amazon. I believe this reflects Amazon’s unwillingness to preorder from Ingram and store in its own warehouses. I’m not sure if this is because Amazon considers Ingram to be competition to CreateSpace (which it owns) or because Ingram sees Amazon as competition or just because there is currently no contractual arrangement between Amazon and Ingram allowing it to stockpile titles.

When Amazon receives an order for your POD book, and finds you available via CreateSpace, the service is immediate. I believe Amazon automatically preorders stock from CS so that it will be available for sale, invisibly to you, and you are not charged if it sits there forever or is returned.

So why not only use CreateSpace – free ISBN, no charge for books, ease of ordering at Amazon? Because there’s a whole wide world out there that isn’t Amazon.

Buying a print book anywhere else

CS is NOT a worldwide distributor (other than for Amazon). When you use the CS expanded services, what happens is that CS uses Ingram to distribute the print book (like many other small vendors). It registers your book in the Ingram database, as “Publisher=CreateSpace” (EVEN IF YOU USE YOUR OWN ISBN, NOT ONE PROVIDED BY CS). This means when a bookstore (including online bookstores) looks for your print book, they search the Ingram database, find it under “Publisher=CreateSpace”, and if they are sensitive about Amazon as a competitor they may refuse to carry it. For example, at Barnes&Noble, where my ebooks are sold, my print books appeared as “available from third parties” (when I only used CS). Some bookstores think of Amazon as competition, and others associate CS with “indies” and scorn indies as presumed low quality.

If you use Ingram directly, you will pay an annual fee for the book, and it’s not as friendly as CreateSpace, and you will need an ISBN. But your books appear to bookstores as “Publisher=YourPublisherName” and no one can tell that you’re an indie publisher (there are thousands of publisher imprints). That means that your print books now appear at online retailers, matching your ebooks, and bookstores are willing to carry them.

Except for the ISBN, the Ingram costs are trivial. Here’s my thinking on why you need your own ISBNs anyway, though lots of indies just go for the short-term savings instead.

The current best practice recommendation is to use CreateSpace for Amazon (not the expanded services) and Ingram (LSI or Spark) for everywhere else.

Distributing via Ingram if you are already distributing via CreateSpace

If you are already on CS and want to go to Ingram, you must FIRST remove your book from CS expanded services (so that it is removed from the Ingram database). This will take a week or two and won’t disturb any of your Amazon customers (and you probably don’t have many other customers for your “Publisher=CreateSpace” entry). You will need to check that it’s been removed by going to Ingram and trying to enter your book with that ISBN – you’ll get an “already there” error if it hasn’t been removed yet. You may have to nag CS customer service until that’s done. The update cycles between the vendors take a while. Be persistent.

Do NOT load your book to Ingram with a different ISBN to avoid this process – having the same edition of your book with different ISBNs will cause problems for you. If you used a CS ISBN, consider it to be retired after the book is removed from the Ingram database – you can only use your own ISBN there. This means you should recreate your Amazon CS edition with your own ISBN, too, after this is done, so that your book has the same ISBN regardless of the retailer.

You can use the same PDF book interior file at both CreateSpace and Ingram, but you will probably need to adjust the PDF cover file because the paper stock used is not identical, and thus the paper thickness is not identical, making the width of the spine different for each service.

POD Quality

The level of quality for the two services’ POD products seems to be very similar, now that CS offers matte as well as glossy covers. Ingram offers more formats (for LSI, maybe not Spark) than CS, but since you will want the same formats for both services, that doesn’t matter. Both POD vendors are of reasonable quality these days, but not quite as good as bulk printing, and errors can happen (tilted covers, defects). There is anecdotal discussion of third party services doing the actual printing for CS that sometimes have quality control issues, but in my experience the problem rate is very low.

You can tell the difference between POD books printed by Ingram and CS if you look closely (paper thickness, color) – therefore I recommend that you put all the books in a series in both places, rather than have some in one place, and some in another. A customer who orders them all will tend to do so via the same retail channel and should therefore get perfectly matched sets. If you are going to be delayed placing all of your books with both POD vendors, do them series by series.
 



BIO

Karen Myers is the author of the best-selling novel To Carry the Horn, the first entry in the series The Hounds of Annwn, a contemporary Wild Hunt fantasy set in a fae otherworld version of the Virginia Piedmont. She is currently working on two new fantasy series: The Affinities of Magic, following a young wizard who launches an industrial revolution of magic, and The Chained Adept, following the adventures of a wizard with a mysterious past and an unremovable chain around her neck. More information is available at Perkunas Press.

Her stories have been published in Strange Horizons, Virginia Living, Virginia Sportsman, and Foxhunting Life.

A graduate of Yale University from Kansas City, Karen has lived with her husband, David Zincavage, in Connecticut, New York, Chicago, California, and more recently in the lovely foxhunting country of Virginia where they followed the activities of the Blue Ridge Hunt, the Old Dominion Hounds, the Ashland Bassets, the Wolver Beagles, and many other fine hunts.

Karen’s professional hunt country photography can be found at KLM Images. She writes, photographs, and fiddles from her log cabin in the Allegheny mountains of central Pennsylvania and can be contacted at KarenMyers@HollowLands.com.

Email: Karen L Myers
Twitter: @HollowLandsBook

Toolbox for Author Collaboration: Part 3

Introduction

There is no doubt that there is power in authors working together – whether it is through big organisations like the Alliance of Independent Authors, or small collectives like Triskele Books. Working together can reap huge benefits but – a bit like a marriage - it not something that can be undertaken ‘unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly’.

Every collaboration is unique, dependent on the personalities involved and what they want to achieve, but each one must ask itself similar questions and overcome many of the same challenges.

Our new series of short articles aims to provide some of the tools you need to plan your own cooperative ventures, be they long-term collaborations or one-off projects.

Series 1: Setting up a Collective

1. Deciding on your objectives / Choosing your travelling companions
2. Sharing the work / Making a plan / Making it watertight
3. Spreading the word / Building communities / Keeping it fresh

Series 2: Harnessing the Power of the Group

Maybe you have now set up your author collective, or perhaps you are still thinking about what kind of collaborative project you could undertake. In part two of our short series of articles we will explore ideas for harnessing the power of the group – and provide some case studies of those who have tried it already.

PART THREE:

SPREADING THE WORD

Triskele partners with Words with Jam, June 2013

One of the biggest reasons for working collaboratively with other authors is that you can make a bigger splash working together than you can as an individual author. So how can you spread the word about your new venture?

1. Who do you most need to reach? How are you going to engage with them? 
2. What is your window on the world? Will the group have its own website / Facebook page / Twitter feed (etc)? How will they be used? 
3. Pool your contacts. Who do you each know (book bloggers, reviewers, booksellers, journalists, fellow writers in similar genres ... ) who could help champion your project? 
4. What sort of environment (virtual or real) do you each operate in most effectively? Perhaps one of you has a big Twitter following. Another may be great on Facebook. Someone else prefers dealing with readers face to face, in book groups or writing festivals. Another has great contacts in local bookshops. How can you harness all that?* 
5. What is there in the ‘story’ of your collective or project that might capture media or press interest? It may be difficult to break down barriers in the national press, but what about local or special interest media 
6. What are your priorities? Do you want to focus on making a big impact around a particular event or launch? Or do you want to find ways of keeping yourselves in the public eye over a longer period? How can you make best use of your shared resources to achieve those aims? 
7. Once again, it’s important to make a plan.

A View from Chichester Indie Authors (CHINDI): 

http://www.chindi-authors.co.uk/

The best decision we made was to build some really strong relationships with our local media, particularly the local paper, The Chichester Observer, and local radio station, Spirit FM. In our case this was of vital importance as we wanted a geographical tight group that could support each other with library talks, book launches, editing workshops etc. I know your group in particular is international but for the Xmas Market, for example, it was easy to spread the cost of hiring a stall for 4 days (approx £400), spread the workload of manning it in the middle of winter, and the logistics of who could collect the books at the end of each day, who had a spare power extension or a money belt. We set the geographic spread relatively wide to 30 miles and that has meant we were able to grow to 17 authors and 2 authors-in-waiting after a year. We sold £650 worth of books by the way.

BUILDING COMMUNITIES

Reader Engagement at our first Indie Author Fair
[photo by Ruth Jenkinson]

Indie authors are some of the most generous, supporting people we have ever had the pleasure of working with. As Triskele we have learnt that everything we do to build links with author authors and to create author communities is repaid to us many times over. The connections you make with other writers will stand you in good stead all of your writing life.

As part of an author collaboration, you have already built an author community. But you are also well-place to reach out to other authors. Here are a few ideas of how you might do that:

1. Interviewing other authors (or hosting their posts) on your blog. (Do you have an angle that makes your blog special and keeps people coming back?) 
2. Reviewing books. Do you make a point of reading books by other indie authors and sharing recommendations of those you genuinely loved? Can you encourage others to share their recommendations? 
3. Sharing information about indie authorship. It’s amazing when you look back to realise how much you have learnt just from the process of publishing one or two books. At the same time, there is always more to learn. Join the Alliance of Independent Authors and take part in their online forum and other activities. Share what you have learnt on your own blog. 
4. Indie authors are often starved of opportunities to sell their books directly to readers. As a collective, you may have the clout to secure a space at a local lit fest, set up your own Indie Author Fair, and invite other authors to join you. (Read about Triskele’s first experience creating an Indie Author Fair here.) 
5. Can your group help guide upcoming indie authors on the path to publication?

A View from Triskele:

From time to time, we have taken on associates, people whose writing we love and whom we all want to work with. Our associates receive editorial support and a guiding hand through the process of self publishing for the first time, and their books are marketed alongside Triskele’s other titles. In return, associates are expected to play a full part in Triskele’s general marketing duties, and to help drive new ideas and initiatives. One of the greatest compliments we ever received was to be described as the Wu-Tang Clan of Indie Authors!

KEEPING IT FRESH

Monitoring, Reviewing Revising

Even if your project is relatively short term, you will want to review what you are doing from time to time, so assess what is working well and what hasn’t been so effective, and to see what you could do better.

If your collaboration is longer term, you’re going to need to find ways of keeping it fresh and exciting.

Early on, in our first article, we suggested that, before you even set out, you should ask yourselves, “How will you know if you have achieved your goals? What is your measure of success?”

1. So now your project has been running for a while, it’s time to look back at what you said then and take stock. 
2. Have you achieved your goals? Wholly? Partially? 
3. Can you pinpoint anything that has been particularly successful? 
4. What hasn’t worked so well? 
5. What obstacles have there been that you didn’t anticipate? 
6. If your project is still on-going, what can you do to build on your successes? What can you do to turn round what has been less successful? 
7. Has the group reached its optimal size, or do you want to consider expanding? (If so, you may want to look again at the ‘choosing your travelling companions’ post.) 
8. If your project has now come to an end, make notes of what went well and what didn’t, and keep a record for next time. 
9. Make sure you get everyone’s opinion, because everyone will see things slightly differently. 
10. Try and get a perspective from outside the group too, if you can.

If this is a long-term collaboration, then every once in a while (perhaps once or twice a year) you will need to take a step back and see what new projects you could engage in that will:

• Keep you in the public eye 

• Keep the group looking innovative and exciting

Over the next few months, we will be bringing you some case studies of projects that different author collectives have engaged in, which we hope will fire your imagination.

A View from Running Fox Books:

It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention. But for us at Running Fox Books, necessity became the mother of re-invention—a new look at our brand from the perspective of readers. 

In December 2014, it became necessary for us to migrate our website to a new home, something that forced us to take a fresh look at how we presented ourselved.

What followed was an intensive couple of months in which we rethought the entire Running Fox concept. From the perspective of the author members, we knew the benefits of a collective; in fact, I’d written an article on collectives for the IBPA Independent. But what about readers? They don’t care how books are published. They just want a place to find good books—in our case, good Alaska-inspired books. Close to two million people visit Alaska each year. Big Five publishers don’t get that market. But we authors do.

As we thought about what we could offer readers that they couldn’t get elsewhere, we landed on the concept of an author-curated bookshop with features that strengthen the author-reader connection, among them a passage picker; a book-your-trip (literally) feature; a matchmaker tool, author confessions, and author insights.

The first phase of our new and improved collective is the website, newly launched. The next phase will involve growing our stable of authors to include those who’ve published traditionally and are looking for ways to extend the shelf-life of their titles. The third phase will involve partnering with groups that have good reach with the Alaska visitor market.

Our focus as a collective has always been to aggregate our marketing efforts. With the help of Cindy’s creative approach to the user-experience web design, we’re now poised to do that in bigger and better ways.

Toolbox for Author Collaboration: Part 2

Introduction

There is no doubt that there is power in authors working together – whether it is through big organisations like the Alliance of Independent Authors, or small collectives like Triskele Books. Working together can reap huge benefits but – a bit like a marriage - it not something that can be undertaken ‘unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly’.

Every collaboration is unique, dependent on the personalities involved and what they want to achieve, but each one must ask itself similar questions and overcome many of the same challenges.

Our new series of short articles aims to provide some of the tools you need to plan your own cooperative ventures, be they long-term collaborations or one-off projects.

Series 1: Setting up a Collective

1. Deciding on your objectives / Choosing your travelling companions
2. Sharing the work / Making a plan / Making it watertight
3. Spreading the word / Building communities / Keeping it fresh

Series 2: Harnessing the Power of the Group

Maybe you have now set up your author collective, or perhaps you are still thinking about what kind of collaborative project you could undertake. In part two of our short series of articles we will explore ideas for harnessing the power of the group – and provide some case studies of those who have tried it already.

PART TWO:

SHARING THE WORK / MAKING A PLAN

Sharing out tasks -
not always what you might expect

So now you have thought through what you what your collaboration is about. You and your fellow travellers have chosen your destination. Your next task is work out how you are going to work together as a team.

1. Are you clear what work needs to be done, when and by whom?

2. How will you make decisions – by majority vote? unanimity? or will one person (or a small subgroup) have the final say?

3. Do you need to assign someone as project manager – either temporarily for a specific project, or longer term?

4. What work do you have the resources to do ‘in house’ and what skills do you need to buy in?

5. If you are buying in services, is this something each author does individually, or are you doing it collectively?

6. If one of the group is providing a service to another, are they to be paid for their time, or is this on the basis of a quid pro quo?

7. Is it practical to assume that each of you will contribute equally in terms of the workload, or is it inevitable (because of their skill set, available time etc) that some will do more than others?

8. If so, are you all content with that, or do you need to do something to redress the balance, financially or otherwise?

Hopefully you have now answered many of the questions in the previous posts, and you have a sense of where you want to go together. So now is the time to MAKE A PLAN.

If you have a specific collaborative project in mind, then you can break that down into specific tasks and decide who is responsible for each task and when it needs to be done by.

If you are planning something longer term, then ask yourselves:

•  What do you want to achieve in the next year? The next six months? The next month? 

• If you’re going to succeed, what do you need to do in the next week? The next month? The next three months? 

DON'T just write a plan and then bury it in a bottom drawer. Make sure that you revisit in regularly and keep it fresh. (More on that later.)

MAKING IT WATERTIGHT

Finance & Legal

Since we are all in the business of publishing and selling books, and therefore to a greater or lesser extent, investing and making money, even the most informal collaborations will at some point need to consider a few financial and legal questions.

Are you planning on setting up a company or legal partnership, or do you intend to operate a looser form of agreement?

Setting up a company can be a massive undertaking, especially if – as may well be the case, given the global nature of indie author publishing – you are operating across national borders.

But working without that legal protection puts even more emphasis on the need for clarity and trust.

• Will you have any shared funds? 
• Do those come from contributions, or from a shared income stream? 
• How do you use those funds? Who authorises expenditure? 
• Who is responsible for holding/managing/reporting on them?

What does each author pay for individually, and what costs do you share?

If you are publishing a number of books under a collective brand, does each author retain the income from sales of their own books?

If you are publishing a book or box set together, how do you set the price, and how do you share the resulting sales income?

Equally, who retains the rights for individual books?

Who holds the rights for any collaborative publications? Who holds the copyright? (This could be particularly important if, say, you publish a book together, and then some time downstream, one partner wants to sell the audio or film rights.)

You may be more than happy operating on trust, but if you have asked each other some of these hard questions up front, you can avoid being taken completely unawares.

A View from Outside the Box, who published the box set  Women Writing Women

I think we get to pat ourselves on the back for a number of good decisions: the theme of unusual/incorrigible women characters instead of limiting to a single genre, the time limit that allowed us to learn, grow and move on, and the moment early on where Jessica Bell said, boom, here's the plan, no more back and forth about every little thing. To be totally honest, I think the very best decision and the very worst decision are one in the same: the price. It kept us from hitting the lists like some of the 99C genre boxes, but it held us to our principles, raised the bar in the public eye and hopefully set an example for authors who feel constantly pressured to sell their work for pennies. The only way to elevate the marketplace is to value our work.

Toolkit for Author Collaboration: Part 1

Introduction

There is no doubt that there is power in authors working together – whether it is through big organisations like the Alliance of Independent Authors, or small collectives like Triskele Books. Working together can reap huge benefits but – a bit like a marriage - it not something that can be undertaken ‘unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly’.

Every collaboration is unique, dependent on the personalities involved and what they want to achieve, but each one must ask itself similar questions and overcome many of the same challenges.

Our new series of short articles aims to provide some of the tools you need to plan your own cooperative ventures, be they long-term collaborations or one-off projects.

Series 1: Setting up a Collective

1. Deciding on your objectives / Choosing your travelling companions
2. Sharing the work / Making a plan / Making it watertight
3. Spreading the word / Building communities / Keeping it fresh

Series 2: Harnessing the Power of the Group

Maybe you have now set up your author collective, or perhaps you are still thinking about what kind of collaborative project you could undertake. In part two of our short series of articles we will explore ideas for harnessing the power of the group – and provide some case studies of those who have tried it already.

PART ONE:

Deciding your objectives

Author collaborations come in many sizes and shapes.

If you are not to run into difficulties and misunderstandings further down the line, it’s important to decide and agree on clear objectives right from the start. Of course, deciding your objectives will to some extent go hand in hand with choosing your travelling companions – which is the subject of the second part of this post.

We’ll get into questions of workload, finance and legalities later, but for now, here are some questions you should ask yourselves up front:

1. Why are you getting together? What do you want to achieve?

2. Is this to be long-term, wide ranging collaboration, like the Triskele Books author collective, or a single, one-off project, e.g. working together on a box-set?

3. What is it that is bringing you together? How would you define your common identity? Do you share a genre (like Notting Hill Press), a location (like Running Fox) or something more nebulous (like Triskele’s A Time and A Place? The clearer you are about this, the easier it will be to market yourselves.

4. If it is to be a long-term collaboration, you still need to set clear, achievable early goals. What do you want to achieve in the first six months? The first year?

5. If it’s a one-off project, is it open ended, or time-limited? Have you set a clear end-point/ break-point?

6. What is the optimal size for the group? (Points to consider here are having enough effort and energy between you for the work you are taking on; being small enough to still know each other well, and having a decision-making process that does not become overly cumbersome.)

7. How will you know if you have achieved your goals? What is your measure of success?

8. How and when will you review what you have achieved?

A view from Five Directions Press:

www.fivedirectionspress.com

As often happens, our best and worst decisions are intertwined. The best was our decision to publish together in 2012. We’ve learned a lot in the last three years—about book production, of course, but also about cooperation and our own strengths and limitations. Above all, we recognize that we need to think much more about the business aspects of publishing, especially marketing, than we did at first. That was our worst decision: to put our books out into the world before we knew how to promote them.

But realizing our mistake led to other good decisions: to extend our reach by connecting with coops like Triskele, to raise our profile on social media and the Web, and to team up with a friend who has extensive business experience. Since January, we have defined our mission statement, updated our website, held discussions with local libraries and bookstores, expanded our list of authors, and developed a basic business plan. We still have much to learn, but we’re excited about moving forward as a group.

Choosing your travelling companions

When you a working together with other authors, everything you do and say reflects to some extent on everyone in the group. And whether you stand or fall depends on everyone playing their part. So whether you are getting together for a one-off project or a long-term collaboration, it’s important to choose your travelling companions with care.

Here are some questions you should ask yourselves when deciding who you want to work with:

1. Do you know and enjoy one another’s work? Would you be proud to see your work on the shelf next to theirs?

2. Can you describe, clearly and succinctly, what brings you together – your common identity?

3. Do you all understand and share the objectives for your project, be-it long-term or a one-off?

4. Do you understand what each of you brings to the table in terms of skills, available workload etc? Does it match expectations?

5. Do you share common standards when it comes to design, editing etc?*

There are inevitably going to be tough times ahead. So here are some really tough questions:

6. Do you trust one another?

7. Do you know that you can each accept criticism without taking it personally?

8. Do you have confidence that each person can deliver what is expected of them on-time and to a good standard, and that they will give timely warnings of any unavoidable problems?

A View from Chichester Indie Authors (CHINDI): 

http://www.chindi-authors.co.uk/

The worst decision we made was not to put in place a vetting process to check standards at the beginning. We weren't going to throw anyone out who hyphenated a compound adjective when it should not have been but we did want to ensure that the CHINDI brand as it developed had some level of quality. We now ask all new members to submit three copies of their book for a basic review of punctuation, layout and cover design. Most of us use different fonts and I controversially left-justify my text as I write kid's books and wanted to copy other authors' books I admired. So there is no one CHINDI way of doing things. One potential member presented a book with 27 errors in the first chapter and said, 'the book would live or die on its merits'. She did not join the group, and her book is now buried near a Siamese cat in Chichester Cemetery.

Look out for the next post in this series: Sharing the work / Making a plan / Making it watertight

Quirk - Charlie Huston

The Joe Pitt novels of Charlie Huston

Reviewer: JW Hicks, author of Rats

This series of Vampyre novels are the epitome of Quirk, and are right at the top of my fave-list.

In Huston’s scarily innovative re-imaging of vampire noir, the style is as ferocious as the content. Huston employs no chapter breaks and no speech tags and the narration is first-person, exclusively through the main character: Joe Pitt.

While Vampyres band together in clans to facilitate survival, Joe Pitt, rogue vamp, goes solo, preferring freedom. But, being a loner, adrift from the safety of a warding clan, is to live on the last inch of a fast-crumbling cliff.

The five novels in the Joe Pitt Casebooks, are set in modern day New York City, with each clan occupying their own territory on Manhattan Island. In the first book, Already Dead, Joe gets mixed up with the Coalition, the city’s most powerful clan; a cross between the mafia and a corporation. To make things right not not only has he to find the missing child of influential parents, but kill a shambler (zombie) infected with flesh-eating bacteria and avoid the crazy Vampyre cult stalking him – all before the sun comes up.

In No Dominion, the second in the series, hard-talking Joe is hovering at the bottom of the barrel, out of blood, his stash empty. So he takes a job with the Society, a gang of liberal vamps. The job? To investigate the new high on the market, a killer scourge that could tear the roof off the Vampyre world and expose it to the human gaze. Turns out it’s a typical Joe Pitt job, involving enforcers, Vampyre hounds, anarchist turncoats, mystical zealots and a punk named the Count, all of them out to skin Joe’s hide.

In Book 3, there’s a battle brewing between the divided Clans of the city’s undead. Guess who’s stuck right in the middle? You’re right, Joe Pitt. He’s been dispatched into the uncharted territory of Brooklyn to seal an alliance with the Freaks. But gets swept into a murderous family feud that will paint the borough scarlet from Gravesend to Coney Island.

The fourth book, Every Last Drop, unlike the first three might concentrate less on the kill-em-all action, and more on dialogue, but still moves twice as fast as your everyday noir fantasy. After a year of hiding out in the bronx, Joe is offered an assignment he can’t refuse. In his search for answers he comes face to face with the horrendous secret that lies beneath the vampire world. Where do the powerful ones get all that blood?

The search for an answer takes him to Queens, and leaves him in possession of vision that he’ll never scrape off his retinas, as well as a bargaining chip that redefines his place in the Vampyre universe.

In the last Joe Pitt book, My Dead Body, civil war is raging. The Clans are at each other’s throats. Joe would be wise to stay out of it, but an old acquaintance drags him in.

Will Joe finally get the answers he’s been looking for?

This is a war with no middle ground, when the blood stops flowing, what side will Joe Pitt be on?
Will the loose ends be neatly tied?
You bet’cha.

Questions and Answers

Emailing his publisher brought no result, but I found an interview published in Ed Zitron’s blog. Ed is the founder of EZPR, an East Coast media relations firm. He has been published by Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, PC Gamer and PC Zone, and is the author of This is How You Pitch: How To Kick Ass in Your First Years in PR.

I emailed him for permission to reproduce the interview and he gave it willingly.

Charlie Huston on Detective Fiction, the Joe Pitt Casebooks and Vampires (With a Y.) 
Interviewed by Ed Zitron. 20/9/10 Follow Ed Zitron on Twitter: www.twitter.com/edzitron 


What made you bring vampires into a detective novel?

It was just one of those things. You're sitting around and thinking about your ideas, and suddenly it's a vampire detective - it isn't rocket science.

Were things like True Blood, Twilight, etc. part of the decision?

No. I don't need anybody's reaction to lead me. I mean I've never read [any of the Twilight] books. I'm not a very aware consumer of pop culture. Even though I write vampire books, it took a really long time for Twilight to penetrate my awareness. I can remember a long time ago having people write me emails and ask me what I thought of Twilight and I said, "What the f**k are you talking about? I have no idea."

Twilight bubbled up in my consciousness about the same time as Charlene Harris and the Sookie Stackhouse stuff, along with the True Blood show and the Twilight movie came about. It doesn't appeal to me at all. Ultimately, I don't like vampires that don't kill and eat [laughs]. You either find a way to take these creatures, and if you are going to use them as your protagonists, and take them on their own terms and find a way to deal with them on their own terms and still make them a character that somebody can get behind. Otherwise, you're just cheating. Well...okay, maybe that's unfair. You're writing something else.

How did the character of Joe Pitt, the protagonist of the books, come about?

Joe was kind of reaction to Hank Thompson, one of my other characters. I'd finished writing the first Hank Thompson book, Caught Stealing, and Hank is definitively not a tough guy. When Hank gets the upper hand on people, it's usually scenarios where he kind of gets the upper hand by accident. He steps on the end of the board and the board pops up and hits somebody else in the head. It was hard to keep him alive during the course of the book and when I starting Caught Stealing I'd originally thought Hank was going to be more of a tough guy, and it just didn't work out that way.

So, I really wanted to write about someone hard-boiled - someone who is a legitimate badass who I didn't have to constantly be rationalizing how he could survive things. I think I just, at some point really wanted to write a tough guy character. I don't even remember where the Vampire thing came in.

You obviously take a lot of inspiration from New York - the series is set there, after all - how long were you here, and how much did you travel?

I lived in NYC for 11 years - I think I wrote up to Half the Blood of Brooklyn before I went to Los Angeles. I then had to return to write Every Last Drop - so much of the book is set in the Bronx, and I hadn't spent much time there. So, I spent a few days in The Bronx.

The locations in Already Dead were very much just my everyday backdrop. The apartment that Joe lived in is actually an apartment that some friends of mine lived in. They had a ground floor and a separate room underneath some big set room, and that's how I kind of setup the architecture of Joe's apartment in Already Dead - the one where he's got a secret below-ground room. All the bars he hangs out are bars that I was hanging out at or had worked at one time or another.

There was even a time when I was spending up my every waking hour at the pizza place. That's the opening of the book, the pizza place where he gets a slice. That's where I'd stop on my way home from work - whenever I got off from bartending, that's where I'd stop off for a slice before I went home.

Has there ever been any talk of adapting the Joe Pitt books into film, TV, comics, anything like that?

There's a screenplay out there that I've read, actually - it's quite good. It was very faithful, but adapted the story in a more Hollywood way - for example, it took the relationship with Evie at the center, which was appropriate.

Who would you have cast as Joe, if you had the choice?

You know, I only have one answer for that, and he's not available - a young Robert Mitchum. That kind of imposing, swaggering, physical presence. He was so unflappable.

So, what's next for you?

Well, the next book is already done, and it's called Sleepless. It was a huge push for me because it's crime in a speculative setting. It's set in 2010, in Los Angeles - the premise is that there's a plague of sleeplessness that's infected 10% of the population. It's a multiple viewpoint narrative. As a result, it's a little denser in terms of the prose. It's not as lean as the stuff I've been writing, and it's definitely much more somber in tone.


http://charliehuston.com/books

ISIS at the gates of ancient Syrian city Palmyra - can Syria preserve the World Heritage site?

by JD Smith, author of The Rise of Zenobia

With the conflict in Syria, Palmyra is not a place I’ve ever managed to visit, despite having spent years writing about the city. Today, Jihadists from the Islamic State Militants are just over a mile from the Unesco World Heritage site at Palmyra and fears are mounting that they will destroy the monumental ruins.

Palmyra dates back to the first century AD, and is most famous for its infamous Queen Zenobia who in the third century led one of the greatest, most threatening rebellions the Roman Empire ever faced. This is the part of history which captured my imagination and led to years of writing the story of the rise and fall of the beautiful city and determined queen …

Buildings sparkled, towering and elegant, marble paved the streets and fountains threw up streams of water. Locals bustled about their business. Gowns draped women, embroidered and woven with threads of gold and silver, sewn with rare stones, and men wore colourful robes or leather armour, carrying shields and spears and swords. Deep scars marked olive skin, and on their arms warrior bands were found. The raucous noise of the busy city deafened. Not unpleasant, but an exciting, pounding rhythm of a prosperous city. I stepped cautiously, for everywhere seemed so fresh and clean and delicate.

Market traders pulled their wares from the path of elephants, camels and horses. Stalls packed every space. I thought many things a rarity, but found them now in abundance. Silks hung from racks: blues, greens, yellows, reds, golds; every colour in between. Bottles of coloured oils and potions swung from wooden pegs, clinking, swaying, jostling to the city rhythm. Ginger, poppy seeds, aniseed, coriander, cumin, fennel, pulse, cloves, bay leaf, Indian spikenard, costly saffron shouted as being for sale, their names spoken for all to hear, yet I smelled them, rich aromas and head-dulling scents of the east.

(The Rise of Zenobia)

Palmyra was a vital caravan city on the eastern trade route. It was taken under Roman control in the mid-first century but, despite this, its people were of mixed Aramaic and Arabic stock, and the language used a form of Palmyrene: a mixture of Middle Eastern Aramaic and Greek.

According to the BBC, ISIS are attacking the nearby town of Tadmur after making an advance across the Syrian desert. Syria's director of antiquities, Maamoun Abdul Karim said he believed Palmyra would end up destroyed, like other ancient sites in Northern Iraq.

He said: "If Daesh [ISIS] enters Palmyra, it will spell its destruction.

"If the ancient city falls, it will be an international catastrophe.

"It will be a repetition of the barbarism and savagery which we saw in Nimrud, Hatra and Mosul." 

In March, ISIS members in Iraq razed 3,000-year old Nimrud and bulldozed 2,000-year old Hatra - both UNESCO world heritage sites. 

The ISIS interpretation of Sharia law sees ancient sites as being idolatrous and sinful.

And this for me is the most ludicrous of views, quite clearly an excuse to cause more unrest, destroying what can never be remade. As if taking lives were not enough the past must also be extinguished. There was a time when Palmyra was at its greatest, an ancient city on a prosperous caravan route, the people living in harmony and many religions mixing happily with one another. Sadly religion seems so often to be an excuse for our actions, rather than a guide as to how to behave in order to live life to the full and in harmony with one another.

I am a preservationist at heart. I cannot bear to see the past slip and slide away from us in any medium. I want to hold it, treasure it and live in it. I am a member of the British National Trust, a restorer of an 18^th century English School House, a collector of the old and the wonderful, and a writer who aims to capture in words deeds and actions and places now eroded by time.

I only hope mine and the words of others, photographs and footage, are not the only remains of the desert city. I hope to one day visit the place I have spent so long imagining, and see it in the glory in which it stands at this very moment as I type. I want to see it as L. Double, author of Les Cesars de Palmyre (1877) once did …

When, after a wearisome day of marching across the Syrian desert, the long caravans descry, in the pale clarity of the stars, the uniform horizon become a serrated line of uneven colonnades, of broken walls, of half collapsed palace facades; when the sand seems at last to disappear, not beneath the verdure of an oasis but beneath an accumulation of marbles and worked stones, silence falls among the travellers, even the calling cameleers cease from their marching songs, and there is nothing to be heard but the sand which cries beneath our feet, and the wind which moans afar among the ruins, and the lugubrious plaint of a hungry jackal; it is then that a man, even the lease civilised, feels himself to be small and, despite himself, meditates on the presence of that mighty ruin as on a mighty sorrow.

In short, I want to stand in the beautiful ruins of Palmyra as I once stood in the Coliseum in Rome and remember Queen Zenobia and the times in which she lived.

JD Smith, is the author of Tristan and Iseult, The Rise of Zenobia and The Fate of an Emperor, editor of Words with JAM and Bookmuse, and the mother of three mischievous boys. 

The Rise of Zenobia is available in ebook, paperback and audio. For more information visit: www.jdsmith-author.co.uk/the-rise-of-zenobia

Liza Perrat interviews Alison Morton, Author of Aurelia

I’m delighted to welcome Alison Morton to the Triskele Books bookclub today.

Alison is the author of the Roma Nova series: INCEPTIO, PERFIDITAS and SUCCESSIO, alternate history thrillers set in Roma Nova, a society founded sixteen centuries ago by Roman exiles and ruled by women.

I recently had the pleasure of reading her newly-released novel, AURELIA, the first in a new three-book cycle within the Roma Nova series. Not having read any of the other Roma Nova books, and knowing nothing about this society, I came to AURELIA with a completely open mind, which is ideally how I like to read a book.

Set in the late 1960s, Aurelia remains within the Roma Nova world – the last Roman colony that has survived into the 21st century. Circumstances force Aurelia Mitela, a proud Praetorian officer, to give up her career, but Roma Nova still needs her to investigate and try to stop grand scale silver smuggling.

Whilst investigating in Berlin, in a page-turning sequence of suspenseful, action-filled adventures, Aurelia meets her terrifying childhood nemesis, Caius Tellus, who seems intent on destroying her. She also meets the beguiling and mysterious Miklós.

I loved discovering the “foreign” land of Roma Nova, the mix of historical and contemporary and of course, the edge-of-the seat thrilling action. A highly recommended read for lovers of alternate thrillers and I look forward to reading not only the previous books in this series, but also the ones to come.

Interview with Author, Alison Morton...  
  
LP: My first question is probably the most obvious: what gave you the idea of Roma Nova? And why a society run by strong women?

AM: Roma Nova started in my head when I was eleven years old and fascinated by the Roman mosaics at Ampurias, in northeast Spain. My father told me stories of soldiers and senators, traders and engineers, farmers and settlers, politicos and slaves. I listened under the hot sun and when he’d finished, I asked, “What would it have been like if women were in charge?” Clever man, he replied, “Well, what do you think it would be like?”

Normal life intervened, but this fantastical idea stayed in my head. I grew more and more fascinated with Rome – a complex society that was noble and brutal, ordered yet adaptable, a great trading and military power running Europe and the Mediterranean basin, yet ending with a teenager kneeling in front of a conquering Goth.

I had the great good fortune to be brought up by a feminist mother; it never occurred to me to do or think anything different from my brother just because I was a girl. When I put on my army uniform, I didn’t think it was remarkable. But I never dreamed the experience of serving in a mixed unit with common purpose would be extremely useful for my writing career years later.

When I sat in front of my computer to write my first novel decades later, all these elements crashed together and my fingers had to work frantically to keep up with my brain!

LP: Did you decide to do a series from the outset? And why?

AM: I wanted to write Karen’s story from the very beginning to when she was fully established, but also wanted to explore the strange place I had cooked up in my head. Of course, it was going to be a thriller – I’d devoured The Saint and John le Carré as a kid. But I found my story was far too big for one book, so before I did the first revision of INCEPTIO I had planned out book two (PERFIDITAS) and was thinking about the outline of book three which became SUCCESSIO.

LP: I found Roma Nova an intriguing concept, but it must be sometimes hard to marry the historical and the contemporary. What are some of the difficulties you’ve encountered?

AM: Most people have some sense of history whether they realise it or not. It could be a grandparent and their war stories, or scoffing cake with the family at a 16th century stately home or watching Poldark or Wolf Hall on the television. We all come from somewhere – look at the popularity of ‘Who Do You Think You Are? To Roma Novans, history and tradition have formed the glue of their society; Roman values have enabled them to survive, so their sense of history is ever present in their daily lives.

Writing this is fun as well as challenging. I approached it in two ways: firstly, getting into the Roman mind-set and secondly, extrapolating from conditions prevailing in the disintegrating Roman Empire at the end of the 4th century, when the timeline from the real world diverged to form the Roma Novan one. Ancient Romans were superb technologists and engineers as well as skilled strategists. So in the modern era they are at the forefront of the digital revolution. All my Roma Novan characters use advanced gadgets and systems for their period. And staying in their traditional mind-set, they exercise the robust response of their ancestors to challenge!

LP: I believe you have an MA in history. Does this background help at all in writing your historical fiction?

AM: Apart from the sheer pleasure of discovering the layers of women’s agency and role in a military context in the 1930s - the subject of my dissertation - the chief skill I learnt was a systematic and persistent approach to research and reporting. I learnt how to look for sources, interpret and contextualize them. Without three sources, any ‘fact’ is rocky. When writing historical fiction of any kind, you have to be so immersed in the society, that you fill gaps intelligently. If you are truly in the zone, you might actually bring insight into a knotty area and make a fresh contribution to history!

LP: Aurelia is the beginning of a new three-book cycle within the Roma Nova series. What made you decide to write another three books about Aurelia?

AM: Two things, really. Firstly, we meet Aurelia as an older woman in INCEPTIO, PERFIDITAS and SUCCESSIO and as I was writing her I found myself becoming fascinated by her common sense, toughness and her loneliness. In INCEPTIO, Karen struggles to visualise her grandmother Aurelia twenty plus years before as a military commander leading a unit to retake a war-torn city. And the mystery of Aurelia’s single life – there is no husband, lover or companion in the family circle or memory, yet she is Karen’s grandmother. Plenty to chew on there. Secondly, I wanted to write about the terrible events twenty-three years before INCEPTIO that scarred Conrad - the heroine’s love interest in the first three books - and threatened the destruction of Roma Nova itself. AURELIA is the pre-cursor to that story.

LP: You publish with SilverWood Books. Was your decision to publish independently a conscious one, and are you happy with self-publishing at this point in time? 

AM: Yes, I’m really happy with SilverWood Books’ professionalism. I self-published a history ebook in 2012 via KDP with 200 academic references which I had to bookmark with hyperlinks. That was hard work, but I learnt a great deal about digital publishing. Mind you, my starting point was zero! I’d edited a local magazine for nine years so had some experience of commissioning printing, and image editing, but I realised that to produce my novels to the high standard I wanted for my novels I needed professional help. Working my way through the Wild West of vanity, subsidy and publishing services companies, I found SilverWood Books, an ethical company run by a multi-published author and which privileges authors and books.

LP: Any hints about the next book in the Aurelia series?

AM: Yes, it’s half-drafted! It starts in the early 1980s when unrest and petty grievances against a weak ruler bubble just under the skin of Roma Nova. A charismatic power-grabber builds a power base and heads a populist rebellion that threatens Roma Nova’s destruction. Even the formidable Aurelia Mitela can do little to stop it…

Alison Morton Bio...

Even before she pulled on her first set of combats, Alison Morton was fascinated by the idea of women soldiers. Brought up by a feminist mother and an ex-military father, it never occurred to her that women couldn’t serve their country in the armed forces. Everybody in her family had done time in uniform and in theatre – regular and reserve Army, RAF, WRNS, WRAF – all over the globe.

So busy in her day job, Alison joined the Territorial Army in a special communications regiment and left as a captain, having done all sorts of interesting and exciting things no civilian would ever know or see. Or that she can talk about, even now…

But something else fuels her writing… Fascinated by the mosaics at Ampurias (Spain), at their creation by the complex, power and value-driven Roman civilisation started her wondering what a modern Roman society would be like if run by strong women…

Now, she lives in France and writes Roman-themed alternate history thrillers with tough heroines.

INCEPTIO, the first in the Roma Nova series

– shortlisted for the 2013 International Rubery Book Award

– B.R.A.G. Medallion

– finalist in 2014 Writing Magazine Self-Published Book of the Year

PERFIDITAS, second in series

– B.R.A.G. Medallion

– finalist in 2014 Writing Magazine Self-Published Book of the Year

SUCCESSIO, third in series

– Historical Novel Society’s indie Editor’s Choice for Autumn 2014

– B.R.A.G. Medallion

– Editor’s choice, The Bookseller’s inaugural Indie Preview, December 2014


Links ...
Connect with Alison on her Roma Nova blog

Facebook author page

Twitter: @alison-morton

Goodreads

Buying link (multiple retailers/formats)...

AURELIA: http://alison-morton.com/books-2/aurelia/where-to-buy-aurelia/

AURELIA book trailer: https://youtu.be/K5_hXzg0JWA