New client website goes live: www.sarahpinborough.com

Sarah Pinborough is a British writer who's been causing quite a stir since her arrival on the genre scene with her 2004 debut The Hidden. She's written and has had published another three novels since then (The Reckoning, Breeding Ground, The Taken) - the latest of which has made the shortlist for this year's British Fantasy Award for best novel - and has another novel (Tower Hill) due from Leisure next year, with a novella (The Language of Dying) also in the pipeline, from PS Publishing.

I'm reliably informed (by Jo, who's read 'em all) that Sarah's books to-date are proper, old-school horror stories, with strong supernatural influences and some genuinely perturbing moments to savour. I'm planning on reading a couple of them on holiday this year, with the aid of a dose of bright Mediterranean sunshine and several ice-cold beers to help dispel the shadows...

Sarah's definitely not shy, either; she's launched herself into the genre convention scene (ably aided and abetted by good chums like Tim Lebbon and Mark Morris) and has been a regular on panels (and in the bar) everywhere from WHC2007 to Alt.Fiction, with forthcoming trips lined up to Fantasycon, next year's World Fantasy and World Horror, plus a writer-in-residence stint at the Pen to Press writers' retreat in New Orleans next May. She's also joined the all-woman horror-writers' collective, MUSE; more on which we'll no doubt be hearing in the near future.

So when Sarah got in touch and asked me to help out with a website re-vamp I jumped at the chance to work with yet another pro-active author who isn't afraid to get out there and get themselves noticed. Aesthetically-speaking, she didn't want the new site to look too hard-core horror-esque, on the grounds that she's currently branching out into crime, thrillers and screen-writing as well. Her brief called for more graphic design skills than I have in my locker, so I called in a freelance designer of my acquaintance by the name of Penn Smith who came up with a suitably atmopsheric main header design and colour-scheme, and I then added the page layout and built the site around her work.

The end result is a new-look site that Sarah seems to be particularly pleased with, which is always great to hear, and ought to be pretty much completely cross-browser compatible, accessible and extensible as time goes on. It's online now at www.sarahpinborough.com. What do you reckon?

August 28, 2007 | Filed Under Work | 7 Comments

Cover Debate: Mike Carey's 'Dead Men's Boots'

On the off-chance you've been following the discussion that's sprung up in the comments section of the previous thread and have been getting annoyed flicking back and forth between here and Amazon to compare the two covers and see what all the fuss is about (I know I have), here they both are:

The version on the left is the one that was originally circulated by Orbit. The version on the right is the one that it was replaced with, and that will be on the cover of the book when it hits the shelves towards the end of the month.

Please feel free to add your own comments on the relative merits of the two on either this post or the previous one, should you feel the urge.

August 17, 2007 | Filed Under Art, Books | 16 Comments

Schedule Watch: Orbit and Tor UK

I've just received the latest update to the publication schedule for Orbit Books, and I've been hanging on to a schedule that Tor UK sent through a few weeks back.

Personal highlights for me look like they'll be:

Orbit

'Dead Men's Boots' by Mike Carey - Click for ordering info from Amazon.co.uk

Mike Carey's third Felix Castor novel, Dead Men's Boots [Amazon] is almost upon us: publication date September 6th. (Amazon seem to have the wrong artwork there...)
I've been promising myself that I'll put aside some time to dive into something by Charles Stross and I might just start with The Jennifer Morgue [Amazon], which is also out early next month, in paperback, and follow that up with Halting State [Amazon], which is due in January.
The third part of K.J. Parker's Engineer Trilogy - The Escapement [Amazon] - will be published in December. Hopefully it'll improve on the rather slow pacing of the second volume (memo to self: pull finger out and post about that one, you finished it weeks ago...)
I've already read Debatable Space [Amazon], the debut novel by Philip Palmer, which is due to be published in January. Space opera with an acid twist, well worth trying out.
Jim Butcher's next Dresden Files novel, White Night [Amazon] is another January title. One for the must-read shelf.
And who isn't looking forward to Matter [Amazon], the new Iain M Banks Culture novel? Due February.

That'll do for Orbit for now. I'll pick a few more from 2008 next time.

Tor UK

The Waking [Amazon] by T.M. Jenkins looks like an intriguing sf / thriller amalgam. One for the old pool-side, read-til-I-drop holiday later in the year, maybe...
That man Stross again... Tor are publishing the UK edition of the first part of his Merchant Princes series, The Family Trade [Amazon] will be out in November.

Time to start planning a bit of a to-be-read list re-organisation... :)

August 15, 2007 | Filed Under Books | 21 Comments

YouTube music: Divine Comedy, Seasick Steve, deadboy & the Elephantmen, Black Keys

Ended up on YouTube earlier, following a link that James Lovegrove sent me (to The Divine Comedy's stab at the perfect Eurovision song - very funny indeed), and I ended up sniffing around for a few minutes to see what I could find by a few of my favourite artists. Here are the first few I came across:

The Divine Comedy perform an acoustic version of their haunting song 'A Lady of a Certain Age' live on the streets of Paris:

Seasick Steve, who plays better blues-rock on three strings than most bands manage with twelve or more, gives it his all, live on Jools Holland's 2006 Hootenanny show:

The video for 'Stop, I'm Already Dead', by deadboy & the Elephantmen:

The video for 'Your Touch' by The Black Keys. Doesn't quite capture the sheer intensity of their live shows, but it's still a damn good track:

August 10, 2007 | Filed Under Music | 2 Comments

'Matter' by Iain M Banks - cover art revealed

My mate Ed Ashby seems to have managed a bit of a coup. Or at least, I'm assuming so as I haven't seen the cover art for the brand new Culture novel, Matter [Amazon] splashed across all the sf news blogs just yet.

In fact, I don't know if it's even official. It's on the Little, Brown website, sure, but there hasn't been a post to the Orbit Books blog... so either this is actually an early draft artwork that some LB website intern has managed to upload by mistake and the guys at Orbit are going to kill me, or it really is the finished product and very few others have seen it yet, in which case, full kudos to Ed!

Of course, the other possibility is that I've had my head under a rock, everyone has seen this already and the previous two paragraphs - plus the newsbite I just posted to UKSFBN - will come back to haunt me (cue a rash of comments with links to 'New Banks cover' posts written months ago...)

But just in case this is still news to a few folks, here's the artwork:

Update, 19:05 hrs: Yup, it's official!

August 9, 2007 | Filed Under Art, Books | 2 Comments

Booktour.com now open to UK registrations

BookTour.com is a new website - that's been launched by The Long Tail author Chris Anderson and co. - that lists details of authors' promotional tours.

It's simple and effective, easy to grasp, easy to use. Admittedly their homepage is a bit sparse and minimalist and they could do with a few usability enhancements here and there, but they have been adding-on plenty of new features recently (is their blog is anything to go by) and apparently a whole raft of further improvements are on the way.

And they've just opened the site to UK authors, readers and publishers: readers can now search for author events taking place in their immediate locality (or anywhere else, for that matter), whilst authors can upload information about their books to their profile page, and authors or publicists can post details of forthcoming book tour information.

There's not much UK info on there at the moment, which means it's a great time for any authors out there who are on tour in the near future to get on there and post their info. It's very easy to stand out in a small crowd and I think the sheer usefulness of a site like this will mean that its popularity will inevitably grow as word spreads, so it'll get busier and noisier as time goes on.

By which point they'll hopefully have launched customised search options (cross-referencing particular genres with UK-specific locations, for instance, so users can search for all sf / fantasy / horror events taking place in their hometown, or across the UK), customisable RSS feeds (it would be great if the feeds were based on the results of the aforementioned searches, but I don't know how technically feasible that might be) and some of the other useful-sounding enhancements that they're working on at the moment.

Anyway, if you're an author or a publicist, check the site out and get your data listed. And if you're a reader or a fan, start running those searches now, just in case you do find something. I'll bet the site's development team will be watching the traffic logs pretty closely to see where the activity is, and the more UK users they spot the faster they'll push through the UK-specific content sections of the site...

August 6, 2007 | Filed Under Marketing | Leave a Comment

Subterranean edition of Steven Erikson's 'Gardens of the Moon'!

File under: Want One!

Subterranean Press have just announced that they'll be publishing a limited edition of the first volume of Steven Erikson's incredible Malazan Books of the Fallen series, Gardens of the Moon, with brand new illustrations by Michael Komarck.

Two editions: numbered hardback (500 copies, $125) and lettered, tray-cased hardback (52 copies, $300) and they've dropped very strong hints that they'll be publishing the rest of the series in due course.

Given that this is one of my very favourite series (even if I haven't quite found the time to read the latest two instalments quite yet) and that the first three books in the series weren't actually published in hardback in the UK, I reckon this would make a particularly nice addition to the old hardback library. Mind you, so would the Subterranean editions of the first two in Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards series (and I've already missed out on the first of those, so I'd have to hunt it down via a dealer, which will obviously inflate the price) and a whole lot of other stuff. And it's a helluvva financial commitment across the whole series of ten books. Time to check the lottery results... nope, not a millionaire this week.

Decisions, decisions...

August 6, 2007 | Filed Under Books | 4 Comments

Client website update: full Joe Abercrombie site goes live

Well folks, here it is: the full version of www.joeabercrombie.com, including an extract from Last Argument of Kings, the third and final part of Joe's rather superb The First Law trilogy, which hasn't been published anywhere else to-date.

It's been an absolute pleasure working with Joe on the site-build. As a film editor by trade he's got a very keen eye for both visual arrangement and fine detail, so his feedback and suggestions have been great all the way along. And as I've always confessed to not counting graphic design as one of my greatest strengths (but dammit, I'll build you a website that works) I've really appreciated the input.

And I reckon the end result is not too shabby at all, if I do say so myself... :)

August 1, 2007 | Filed Under Work | 4 Comments