charles barrow's writing

I've been pirated. I've had one of my books - The Stolen Days of John Mann - stolen (oh the irony). A website that calls itself an on-line library, has been recruiting 'editors' whose task it is to upload ebooks that will then be available to download from the site. The 'library' doesn't seem to much care where their 'editors' are sourcing their uploads from. Obviously self-published authors are an easy target for this kind of scam because we have no big publishing house behind us to threaten legal action if the uploads aren't removed. Users subscribe to the site and pay a membership fee for access to all the 'free' content. So the website's creators are receiving payment for content that they don't own, and the authors and creators of said content get nothing, no royalties at all.  I found out about this this morning from @BookSpotlight on Twitter. They tweeted about it as several authors had contacted them to highlight what was ...

Really happy to announce that my books are finally available to buy as ebooks on Amazon.co.uk About four years ago I set out, with a plan, to write some books and get them published on Amazon. It's been a long road to get to this point, with lots of ups/downs/caffeine/tantrums/midnight oil burning/fist pumping etc but I finally got here, to this red letter day.

I'm re-reading books 1, 2 and 3, and giving them a buff and a polish: a comma here, a carriage return there, a shiny new adjective dropped into a sentence. No major changes, then, just a few tweaks. All of this is in preparation for them being uploaded to Amazon, to make them available on Kindle. I have had qualms about doing this, but I have to concede that Amazon is the largest shop window in the world, and if I want to find a wide audience for my writing, for my stories, then they need to sit on a shelf in their store. I don't think I can afford to have moralistic qualms when I'm an unknown writer looking for readers. I've given myself thirty days to get my reading and editing done, and to get the books uploaded and launched.

John Mann - At Day's End will be available to download very soon, as soon as I upload it to Smashwords in fact. It's the third, and final, book in the John Mann trilogy. And it needs a cover, of course, and working on it provided me with an opportunity to revamp the covers on books 1 and 2. This is their first public outing.  I'm almost happy with them. I think I'm too close to be objective so I'll live with them here for a few days to see if they still sing to me at the weekend. They may, of course, have started to nag and shout by then, but either way I'll have my answer. Photos are the author's own

Writing is hard. I knew that when I set out to tell John Mann's story just over two years ago (after an innocent and inauspicious beginning, recounted elsewhere on this blog), but writing it in the format that I have has made the job much harder than it needed to be I'm sure. I rather liked the idea of writing the story in serial form, it seemed more manageble that way, seemed like something I could commit to and stick with, and it never did Charles Dickens any harm I reasoned. Well, I have been committed and I have stuck but, damn, it's been difficult. I actually think I missed the whole point of serialising. I think I should have published a handful of chapters at a time, maybe on this blog, rather than in short story - verging on novella - format on Smashwords. For one thing it's made the gap between stories appearing much longer but it has also committed me to certain story strands and I hadn't forseen that consequence at all. For example, I create a charact...

I'm reading a science fiction thriller at the moment. The Stone Man by Luke Smitherd. It's an ebook, self published I'd guess. It's gripping stuff, I'm enjoying it so far. Someone should make it into a movie. Reading the book I was reminded of this photo of a stone man I took a while ago in the grounds of an Abbey. It's not anything like the stone man described in Smitherd's story, his is featureless. I remembered this one looking as though he was in pain or torment, perhaps frozen in time as Medusa turned him to stone. Now I see the photo again I'm thinking he looks more rapturous, with his face turned to heaven. Photos are the author's own.

I started writing this post, in draft, way back in January. After several posts in the closing months of last year detailing the progress of Book 2, The Darkening Days of John Mann, I suddenly leapt to a post declaring it finished and published without me having said anything about the very last part of that process. That is what the bulk of those January scribblings were concerned with, so rather than let them die a quiet death I post them here now.  I published The Darkening Days of John Mann on 26th December 2014. I self-published it in ebook format, on Smashwords.com and was very happy to see it ship quickly to Barnes and Noble. I'm thinking though that I could have chosen a better time of year to launch it, and wonder if its impact wasn't blunted by putting it out at Christmas. At the time I just chose a moment when I had a bit of breathing space in the mad dash that is the festive season. Two weeks prior to launch day I had drawn up a list of some 20 tasks I needed to...