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Saturday, September 13, 2014

Crime Time Is Now An Ebook!



This evening I had an email from my publisher, Paul Collins of Ford Street Publishing, to say that you can now buy Crime Time:Australians Behaving Badly from Amazon, both in paperback and for Kindle. Yay! About time! 



Apparently, if you buy it in paperback from Amazon, they'll sell you the ebook much cheaper. 
Not sure how many people would want to buy both but hey, you can always give the paperback 
as a gift to the child in your life and enjoy the ebook yourself. 
If you prefer ePub, iBooks already 
has it in this part of the world and I imagine the US page 
will be  taking pre-orders already and selling in a few days - 
Paul assured me it would be up on iBooks -presumably
 the US iBooks page - soon. 

I'm quite excited. This is one book that I worked my guts out on and for which I had such high hopes 
and it made so few sales it never earned back its advance despite excellent reviews and the fact that 
when kids saw it, they wanted it. Not sure how well it will do in the US, where it's likely to 
get banned for violence(well, it IS a history of crime, what are you expecting, fairies and butterflies?). 

But the thing is, neither bookshops nor the distributor website knew what to do with it or where to put it. The cover, which was designed by Grant Gittus, who did the posters for the Word Science Fiction Convention, is simply gorgeous, but it made the book end up in adult  true crime. I remember asking in Borders for the section on crime and the young salesman saying,"What, in the CHILDREN'S section?" On the distributor's website it was under non fiction. Even my local library put it in the wrong section till I told them it was a children's book. 

So this new thing gives me some hope that there will be a new lot of reviews, including some overseas. And maybe some sales.

There's a sample chapter on this site(check out the side of this page) both in HTML and in ePub, in case you want to see what you're getting - well, you can do that on iBooks anyway, and Amazon gives you a peek inside too. But this is a favourite chapter of mine, about the April Fool's Day blunder by two dimwitted robbers.

I will probably do a Goodreads giveaway to celebrate even though I have had little luck with giveaways in the past. 

I also have some great bookmarks, both Crime Time and Wolfborn, for consolation prizes.

What do you think? Should I do another giveaway? 


3 comments:

A latte beckons said...

Our local library no longer separates children's and adult non-fiction, so at least there will be no confusion there :)
Congratulations, Sue.

Sue Bursztynski said...

Yes, my local library doesn't go past the 300s in the children's section and I'm thinking that they may have decided it wasn't suitable for children, because it seems to be out of the catalogue altogether!

George Ivanoff said...

Very pleased that it's finally available as an eBook. It is a great read. I hope that it gets a second life in the digital world... it certainly deserves it.