I’m just about done with my novel Turing & Burroughs that I’ve been working on for two years. I’ll be selling it through my Transreal Books site starting around September 22, 2012.
Right now you can read my book-length set of notes for the novel, “Notes for Turing & Burroughs,” it’s a free PDF online, it’s about 4 Meg, the length of a novel, profusely illustrated, a free download brought to you by Transreal Books.
This draft cover image is based on a painting I did around October 9, 2010, see my blog post about it: “Turing and the Skugs.”
Up until about a week ago I was calling the book, The Turing Chronicles, but, while doing my final revisions, I decided that Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel is a better fit.
I went ahead and changed history, by updating my many old blog posts on the novel to use the new name. You can get a comprehensive list of the posts with this blog search .
Here are a few of the posts, individually linked.
July 28, 2012. “Transrealism Interview With Leon Marvell,” Includes discussion of TURING & BURROUGHS.
July 16, 2011. Blog post on V-Bomb Blast painting.
July 9, 2011. “Finished 1st Draft of TURING & BURROUGHS.”
May 29, 2011. TURING & BURROUGHS Excerpt. “Bill/Joan Showdown.”
March 4, 2011. “A Skugger’s Point of View.” Painting for TURING & BURROUGHS.
November 9, 2010. “William Burroughs in Palm Beach”.
December 12, 2012. “Burroughs Letters from Tangier.” I modeled two chapters on these.
[Burroughs after his arrest for shooting his wife Joan in Mexico City. Photos found in James Grauerholz, “The Death of Joan Volmer Burroughs: What Really Happened?,” 2002. Joan’s ghost has it out with Bill in my novel.]
September 10, 2010. “What Was Alan Turing Really Like?” With excerpts of Alan Hodges’ bio.
July 7, 2010. “Turing and the Happy Cloak.” Birth of my “skug” concept.
August 22nd, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Yay! I have to ask: Do you get more from Ebooks or Paperback (assuming it will be available)?
August 23rd, 2012 at 6:24 pm
JamesPadraicR, There’s not a simple answer to whether an author makes more from Ebooks or Print. Sometimes you seem to sell more Ebooks than Print books, so you might make more from the Ebooks in that way. On a per-item basis, a publisher sells Ebooks at a lower price, but of course they have to pay more to get the more expensive Print books produced and shipped. The items sold thorugh Amazon have other expenses charged to the publisher as well, and this is variable. And the expenses can be different with other distributors. So the per-item profit might well be about the same, but it can tip towards one or the other.
In the end, of course, you want to sell your books in both formats, although making a book file suitable for both Ebook and Print is a fair amount of work, with different issues involved for each format. It took me about six months to figure out how to do this well, and even now I’m still learning more about the process.
August 24th, 2012 at 7:29 am
Thanks. I kind of assumed that it worked out even, but wasn’t sure. I’ve read what Charlie Stross has written about it, but he’s usually talking about traditional publishing companies.