I was recently asked be a guest on the Enthusiasticast podcast, which was a real treat because it’s the best literary podcast I’ve ever subscribed to, and it’s always at the top of my playlist. Guests are asked to endorse a book, so I championed Derek McCormack‘s The Haunted Hillbilly. (Take that, Canada Reads!)

Check it out to listen to me talk about The Warhol Gang and Please, the beautiful depravity of Derek McCormack, gunsight porn and — yes, you guessed it — why Harlequin romances are in fact feminist texts.

I was recently interviewed by Marissa Tiel, a Ryerson j-school student, about the ebook revolution. Check it out here.

I realized partway through the first draft of my latest book, The Apocalypse Corpse, that my writing style had changed. Hopefully for the better, you say! Ba-dum-dum….

Seriously, though, I’ve been writing shorter paragraphs and sentences, and making sure I’m always indicating the speaker when it comes to dialogue. I wasn’t exactly the sort of writer who carried on with long paragraphs in my previous books, but in the new book I’m really sharp and short.

I don’t think this is good or bad. It’s just an evolution in my writing based on my reading. And I credit ebooks for the evolution. I’ve found long paragraphs in ebooks can be a bit difficult to read. The screens are smaller than print pages, so you only have room for a few lines of text at a time. Those longer paragraphs that take up half a page in a traditional print book just turn into a wall of text in an e-reader, and I find my mind wandering as I stare at them. I’d say it’s just me, but other people on book forums have voiced the same issue, so it seems there’s something about our wiring that makes us lose interest when faced with too much text and not enough breaks. Make of that what you will.

The same goes for witty exchanges of dialogue between characters. On a printed page, I can usually follow who’s speaking without needing too many dialogue tags. But in an ebook, I sometimes get lost once I’ve advanced the page past the initial “he said, she said” tags. Then I have to go back and trace it out. In my own writing now, I’m careful to throw in a dialogue tag every few lines now to ensure that readers don’t get lost.

So there’s no doubt to me that the reading technology is changing writing style. I’m seeing it happen in real time.

I suppose some people may consider that a negative. Maybe it is. I don’t know. But if so, the positives still far outweigh it. Consider this: Last night around midnight, I was lying in bed and wanted to read some genre fiction. So I picked up my iPhone and logged in to the Kindle Store and bought Masked, a collection of dark superhero stories. A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to make a spontaneous purchase like that in bed at night and be reading the book a minute later. So it all balances out.

Please note that the ebook version of Please is now available on the iBookstore and the Nook, as well as on the Diesel bookstore. Kobo and Sony versions should be coming soon. They’re in the queue.

And, of course, there’s the Kindle version.

I finished the first draft of The Apocalypse Corpse yesterday. I feel nearly dead myself.

It was the most intensive, feverish writing experience I’ve had yet, as I wrote around 80,000 words, or just under 300 pages, in three months (I started the book Jan. 1). I was hoping to have a first draft done in six months, so I’m happy and surprised to have managed a draft so quickly. And burned out.

It’s a very rough draft, and I imagine it will take at least another three months to polish the next draft, fill in the plot holes, etc. And then, me being me, I’ll want another half dozen drafts to polish things some more before I send it off to the agent. But the good news out of all this is you should be reading a new book from me sooner rather than later.

Oh, what’s it about you ask? I don’t want to talk too much about it at this point, so I’ll just say it involves a repo man with amnesia, a billionaire who made his fortune off the Chernobyl accident, a beautiful hit woman, and a mysterious, dismembered body. Actually, it features lots of bodies. And body parts. And people losing body parts. Just another fun Darbyshire novel. Although I warn you now: this one is slightly weird.

If you like the weirdness of The Warhol Gang, then you may be interested in the future of speed-of-light trading.

Abstract: We need to build islands at sea to house “relativistic statistical arbitrage trading nodes” that would avoid “light propagation delays.”

Couldn’t make this up.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’re already aware of my grand ebook experiment, where I’m selling my first book, Please, as an ebook. But what you might not be aware of is my pricing experiment. I’ve been quietly tweaking the price of Please and trying out different prices to see where the sweet spot is, and the results have been surprising.

First off, I want to stress the sweet spot for me is maximizing readership, not profit. If I can earn more money off fewer readers at a higher price, I’ll take the lower price/profit and more readers, thank you very much. I’m in this to have my books and stories read, not for the money. Such at it is.

OK, now that I’ve got that out of the way….

When I first published Please on Kindle, I set the price at $2.99. That seemed to be the going rate for indie books, so I figured I may as well start there. Please wasn’t exactly indie — it had been published by Raincoast back in 2002 — but it was close enough at this point. It did OK at the $2.99 price point, but I wasn’t exactly finding a new generation of readers.

So I followed the example of other writers who temporarily lowered their price to 99 cents to generate interest in their works. I changed the price of Please to 99 cents and waited for my new legions of fans to start messaging me.

Instead, my sales dropped. Considerably.

Now, when you lower your price to 99 cents, you expect your profits to drop because your royalty rate changes. With Amazon and I think most other services, you make 35% of the selling price up to $2.99, and then you make 70% for books priced $2.99 and higher. So there’s a financial incentive to set the price higher. The 99-cent price point is a loss leader of sorts — you lower the price and earn less but you get more readers into your virtual bookstore.

The problem was not only was I making less, but I was also attracting fewer readers. So that experiment blew up in the lab….

I decided to change the price back to $2.99, but then on a whim I set it at $3.99 instead. What the hell, I figured. If that price didn’t work, then it would only take a few minutes to change it.

I have to admit I was surprised when I sold more books at $3.99 than at $2.99 — and way more than when Please was priced at 99 cents. Why? I have no idea. Maybe it was people avoiding the lower price points because the lower prices are associated with lower-quality self-published books. Maybe the ebook version of Please was just starting to get noticed when I changed the price. I really have no idea.

So I’m going to keep experimenting. I’m going to drop the price back down to $2.99 for the month of April to see the difference. Then in May I’m going to raise it to $4.99. We’ll see what surprises June has in store.

Like I said above, I’m really interested in the number of new readers I can find for Please. The money is nice and all, but I’m not getting rich off the book, so whatever. I’d much sooner get more people interested in my fiction than earn a few extra bucks. Although both would be just fine.

I’ll post back here with results when I have them.

I also plan to do a post on how ebooks are changing my writing style. Because they are. But that’s still a work in progress.

And remember, vote loud and vote often.

Hell of a productive day. I sat down to tackle a scene near the end of The Apocalypse Corpse that I wasn’t sure how to handle — and killed it. No, really. There are bodies. In fact, I was so in the apocalyptic spirit that I wrote another Very Important Scene That Ties Up Some Story Threads and set up the finale of the book. Which I’ve already written in my mind, so it’s just a matter of getting it down in the Pages document now.

So I think the first draft of the book will be done shortly, although it’ll be rough. Very rough. And missing a few scenes. But that’s what first drafts are — the memories of the drunken night before.

Not bad considering I also did an interview last night about The Warhol Gang, and one this morning about the ebook phenomenon that is sweeping the free world. And got the pub date for the paperback version of The Warhol Gang in Canada (May). Plus, I remembered to feed the toddler. With some help.

Today’s touchstone in the new book: Alcor.

The picture above is a variation of another one I posted in my Flickr stream the other day. Spring!

Lehman Brothers

The Berlin Wall

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations

McDonald’s

Chernobyl

Yep, just another day at the office.

My newspaper column on self-publishing on Kindle went out on the wires and got picked up by several papers this weekend. As a result, I’ve had more than a few emails from writers — aspiring and established — asking how they can publish on Kindle. So I’ll just point everyone to this post I did a few weeks back explaining how to get your ebook in digital print.

If it doesn’t answer your questions, feel free to message me for more advice. It may take me a while to get back to you, but I promise I will get back to all of you. Eventually.