What a crazy week. This past weekend we hosted the Great British Tattoo Show at the Kensington Olympia where lots of people got tattooed (self included), lots of people got their photo taken with other people and a good time was had by all. There'll be a ton of material kicking about from that over the next few days - we're just collecting all the photo shoots together, but some bright spark forgot we were moving offices this week as well, so that kind of threw a bit of a spanner in the works. File under pending for a little while longer. The good news on that front was that earlier this week I had the opportunity to get on top of some of my own things. I took delivery of a big stack of limited edition hardback and softcover editions of Black Dye, White Noise which look brilliant. I'm pretty damn pleased with that all round - so much so that I even stayed up all of Tuesday night figuring out how to format correctly load up for the kindle, ibooks and Barnes & Noble. The kindle version went live this morning - the other two will apparently take a little longer. How much longer I'm not sure but I've heard it can be a few weeks. Once I know, I'll rustle up a post because it's pretty stupid for one route to take about 10 hours and the other to take hundreds of hours.

That leaves me free to get on with Raised On Radio next and figure out what the rest of the year has in store. I'm also working on two freaking huge monster book projects. If I can pull it off, they will be quite something to have in the arsenal. One of them has a publisher attached already, the other is a personal project that's going to take some real hard work to pull together but it will be more than worth it.

Sometimes I think that sleeping might be a good idea but that never got anybody anywhere in the twenty first century.

Anyway, while I was running up e-reader docs for Black Dye, I remembered that the red-headed step-child that is The Language of Thieves & Vagabonds had never really been pushed, so I did that too. Here's the link for it on the kindle - same thing applies for ibooks and the nook as above. I'll let you know. If anybody out there is clued in the ebook front, perhaps you could drop me a line over whether it's even worth bothering with the kobo thing?

I've said my piece on smashwords already. Using that as a shop front for your material is a joke. It might be easy and it might be free, but taking something I've worked my ass off on for months on end and handing it over to a store that's happy looking like a junk shop is not for me.

Oddly, I've just realised that nobody on the face of the planet is talking about the Sony Reader anymore. I think we need to consider that product dead and buried.

Sometime ago, I predicted that with the advent and progression of digital reading, more art books would come to the fore leaving people who loved books with their love of stories intact and satiated digitally. Thus, without the need to pile cheap paperbacks with no actual artistic value beyond the story itself sky high in their libraries, the literary world would become not only a better place to be, but a nicer thing to look at as well. Since I said that, I have also come to realise that digital reading is much closer to the ancient traditions of storytelling and audio books, even more so - but that's a whole other blog post. I didn't see myself becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy but here I am. I do indeed have less fiction titles around the house but now, I also have some monstrous tomes in my life. By the very nature of what I do in the day, I have quite a lot of titles from Edition Reuss. Their books are second to none production wise and if you ever wanted to know how to publish a book to impress, just get a hold of one and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, while hunting down some items for some friends for Christmas, I stumbled across the Kiss Kompendium. It looked pretty big and I figured an official collection of every Kiss comic might be a neat curio to have around the house. I thought it would be a solid book. I didn't however expect it blow my face off. It's twice the size of any of the Edition Reuss books, which is a feat in itself. It has well over 1000 quality pages and to be honest, for £30 (here's the amazon link) is more than great value for money.

I should have known better - hand on heart, this is the best slice of Kiss I've laid my hands on in an incredibly long time. How it made it past my Kiss radar, I'll never know - it's been out for a while.

Talking of Kiss - which I seem to be doing a lot lately - here's a great news story for you.

Eleanor flies to Shanghai tomorrow morning for a week, so the rest of the day will be full of packing stuff and hunting down things that are probably still unpacked from the house move. This leaves me with a week left to my own devices. I plan on the first couple of days being about 23 hours long in full on work mode. It's time to let a couple of cats out of the bag.

Finally, no blog post is surely complete without some video footage of a rhino being airlifted to safety from poachers...