Samit Basu's Blog: Newsletter!, page 9

It’s still a good way away, but the mighty Shyam has been tracked by our spy network, and chained to a pillar until he delivers the rest of Local Monsters. He’s almost halfway through the art now. Here’s a page he sent in a few days ago:

There’s something slightly unreal about seeing reviews of your book up on sites you’ve been reading and admiring for years. The IGN review day was a particularly surreal one… and today, there’s a Turbulence review out on Wired.

“Turbulence has it all… Solid writing, great character development, humor, personal loss, and excellent points to ponder in every chapter.” – James Floyd Kelly.

Super thrilled. I hope some of the rest of the US feels this way too, when it’s out next year there! Off to the UK tomorrow for the book tour, wish me luck.

It’s been more then ten years since I finished writing The Simoqin Prophecies, and decided that I wanted to do this writing thing for a living. A decade later, I’m still writing, and I’m most pleased that my first books available worldwide (some of the comics are, but this is the first of my novels) are the first books I wrote.

Publishing’s changing very fast, and the barriers that kept the Gameworld books from the rest of the world (editors liked them, but marketing departments in the west said there was no way they could sell an unknown Indian author who wasn’t writing an about-India book) no longer really apply. Over the years, some of the loveliest emails I’ve had have been from readers from very far away – Estonia, Norway, South Africa, Argentina – who said they’d really enjoyed the book. They’d got it from friends who’d come to India, or through the efforts of a fantastic librarian, or through some other story that would make a good middle-school ‘Diary of a Book’ essay. And I’d always wonder what would happen if it was suddenly possible for anyone with an Internet connection to find the book.

I guess I’ll find out now.

These are ebooks out there in the wicked world with millions of others, and this isn’t some big publisher-backed launch. They’re being e-published by the Jabberwocky agency, New York, the sister agency of my wonderful agents at Zeno in London. The books will have to survive the same way they did in India when they came out – word of mouth, readers simply telling readers about the book, and hopefully writing/blogging about it. This is what kept Simoqin in Indian bestseller lists for six months, far longer than the other four, before the age of high-budget marketing and brand-name authors in Indian publishing (something I really need to get some kind of grip on) became a real and important thing.

So this is pretty much my whole marketing campaign – please do get yourselves a copy. They’re out on the Kindle store, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and the Apple store for iBooks. Links are on the book pages, and the Buy menu on the sidebar to the right, and the menu above. And if you’re a reader, or a passing well-wisher, do tell your friends, or give us a passing Internet mention. The books mean well, and it’s a harsh world out there.

The Soviet “Hobbit”, 1976 | Retronaut.

found this via Lavie Tidhar today – do have a look. Lovely illustrations from the Soviet edition of The Hobbit.

So, from late September to mid October I’ll be in the UK, attending festivals, doing events and otherwise having a good time. Here’s the schedule as of now, I’ll update it and provide links as more details come in.

Forbidden Planet Pre-Fantasy Con Event  – 6pm 27th September

Fantasy-con 11am 28th – 1pm 30th September (reading at 10am on Sat and Titan launch event at 11am)

Signing in Brighton Waterstone’s –  1pm 30th September

Talk and Signing at Piccadilly Waterstone’s – 6pm 2nd October

Leeds Literature Festival  – 2pm 6th October

Oxford Event with Asia Pacific Society – 10th October

Manchester Literary Festival –  6pm 15th October

Come meet me! Tell your friends!

Congratulations to SF Signal for winning the 2012 Hugo for best fanzine! I’m in SF Signal’s Mind Meld this week. It’s on non-Anglo writer presence in the Hugo Awards.

Honoured that one of my favourite web-wander destinations, the World SF Blog, is doing an author week for me. Coming soon (I’ll fill in the links as they come out): a guest post, a Turbulence review, an interview and a short story, Electric Sonalika, from the recently released Apex Book of World SF 2.Thank you Lavie Tidhar, Charles Tan and everyone else at the World SF Blog.

Reviews

Interviews

Articles/Posts

International editions of the Gameworld trilogy are out any day now.

More than a month now since Turbulence came out in the UK, and it’s doing well by all accounts – thank you for that. If you’re in the UK and you haven’t read it yet, drop whatever you’re doing and go get it in paperback or on Kindle . If you need more convincing, do visit the Turbulence page, or the Reviews/Interviews pages under the About menu, for more as they come in. There are guest posts as well, for the Turbulence online tour, and those are under Articles/Posts in the Other Writing menu.

For Indian subcontinent readers, The GameWorld Trilogy is out on Kindle! Also working on the international Kindle edition, which should be with you soon. The edits are done. It was a most interesting experience – I rarely if ever like stuff I’ve written even a few weeks earlier, and Simoqin was done a decade ago.

Welcome back. If it’s your first time here, I’m so glad you came, do stick around – unless you’re in a hurry, which must mean you want to buy stuff. First item on the sidebar on the right

If you’re looking for anything in particular, it should be easily found in the menus above or on the sidebar. If not, do get in touch. Or get in touch anyway, distraction is essential for successful procrastination.

I’m on Twitter a lot, and Facebook quite regularly. I occasionally pop up on Pinterest and Google+ as well. I used to blog regularly years ago and keep promising myself that I’ll start again – recent posts, and a calendar dating back to 2004 are in the sidebar.