Night Time in Shanghai...
(Thanks to Owen Lowery for the pic)
...has been on sale for eighteen days at the time of writing. It seems to be doing reasonably well for a new book from a new author that nobody's heard of. The marketing team at my publisher, Austin Macauley are in the process of contacting sci-fi reviewers and bloggers in an attempt to raise it's profile a little, but this process takes time. It's impossible for my publisher to give me numbers - books are supplied to the main wholesale suppliers in the UK/ US on a sale-or-return basis, so although quite a few copies have gone out, quite a few may be coming back! One way I can gauge sales is to look at sales of the novellas, Proctor: The Art of Living and Proctor: The Art of Killing which do seem to have picked up a little.
Authors live and die on reviews, so if you have read any of my books, please leave me a review on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com - also, if you have read Night Time in Shanghai, please leave a review on my publisher's website.
It is a very exciting time, and the majority of new books by new authors are very slow to take off with few or even no sales in the first couple of months, and I'm definitely doing better than that - I even sold a copy myself in The Swan Inn at Fradley Junction, south of Burton-upon-Trent.
If you would like a signed copy of one of the first batch, first print, first edition hardbacks, then please get in touch with me, either through the comments at the bottom of this page, or through my Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/AndyEllisWriter/
The Product of My Dreams
Progress with The Product of My Dreams has been slow, but it is beginning to pick up pace now. At the time of writing, I have written just under 24,000 words and I'm around halfway through Chapter 6. The book is in three threads one from the perspective of an old woman, one from the perspective of a six year old girl and one from the perspective of a young woman. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but it is quite challenging to see the world (a world) from the point of view of a six year old girl, and in places I've had to use a little licence to make the story comprehensible.
The Product of My Dreams is a look at Virtual Reality (in a very non-Matrix sense) and the nature of time and tries to put into a perspective what this may mean for us and the world we live in, but at the same time, it is a tale of the lives of the three women and how those interact. It's hard to say much more than that without giving the game away. I think if someone were to insist on me giving it a classification, I would say it's a thriller, but definitely not in the same sense as Night Time in Shanghai which it is easy to classify as a 'Revenge Thriller'. Certainly, you want to know what's going to happen to the six year old girl, alone in a war zone and the older woman, whose mind wanders through the mysterious layers of virtual reality and the young woman who seems to have a rare gift - how could a mistake she makes have always been a part of real history and what implications does that have for the world she lives in?
In a way, I'm taking a risk with The Product of My Dreams - it's intended to provoke thought and allow people to see how I view Virtual Reality. It also has some interesting implications regarding the nature of time and also around the nature of spacetime and the effect of observation on quantum reality, particularly the precepts that 'consciousness creates reality' and 'reality is created by observation'. If all of that went over your head, don't worry! it's still a thrilling and mysterious read with a whopping great twist.
Boaty Stuff
I left Braunston Marina two weeks and two days ago and yesterday booked into Mercia Marina (just south of Derby) for a month. With Christmas just a week away, and the chance of some cold to very cold weather in the next month or two, that's the last of my travels until February. Mercia is on the Trent and Mersey Canal, and at this time of year, The Canal and River Trust close locks to repair them. From the fourth of January until the end of February, they will be closing Swarkestone Lock (north east of me) and Junction Lock (south west of me) effectively locking me into this small stretch of the T&M.
On my way up here from Braunston, which is a journey of 71 miles going through 28 locks, I took a few pictures - here's a small selection...
Braunston Marina, frozen over, the day before I left.
Newbold-on-Avon (just north of Rugby, North Oxford Canal)
Hawkesbury Junction (North Oxford Canal meets Coventry Canal)
Frozen in at Hawkesbury Junction
Hartshill (Coventry Canal)
A boat full of books!
Atherstone (Coventry Canal)
Hopwas (Coventry Canal)
Fradley Junction (Coventry Canal meets The Trent and Mersey Canal)
Sunset at Fradley Junction
Alrewas (Trent and Mersey Canal)
Willington (Trent and Mersey Canal)
A very festive Mercia Marina
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