Takeaway is a short crime story set in Beijing and featuring Detective Song Ren, the central character in my books The Pool of Unease and The Slaughter Pavilion. One hot (and no doubt smoggy) day, Song is dozing in his office when he is visited by a young woman. She claims her parents poisoned her and stole her identity. Her story becomes even stranger when she tells Song that she is now on the run, wanted for a murder she didn’t commit. She begs for Song’s help and, being the gentleman that he is, he tries his best.
This is my first foray into direct publishing, and I have to say Kindle makes it easy. The only tricky thing is the cover, and I was lucky to have a fantastic image taken by my brother, Peter, and my son Alistair’s techy know-how to help. I’ve pasted the cover below. There’s been a lot of chatter about direct publishing. Is it the end of literature as we know it as the unpublished masses stop the printing presses, or is it the democratisation of literature? Without the editorial gatekeeper of the traditional publishing houses, will we even know how or what to read?
All I would say is that, as a published writer, I know how thin the knife edge is between being published and not being published. And I know that decision can hang on the decision of a marketing department concerned that the book doesn’t fit neatly into a category. I suspect there are a lot of unpublished novels that are worth reading, and that may find their homes on Kindle. Stories that don’t neatly fit the length requirements of a novel, or plain old short stories, find a home on Kindle where previously their only home had been the bottom drawer.
Anyway, Takeaway is available here for 77 pence, or free on 23rd and 24th February. If you enjoy it, it would be great if you could leave a review.
And while you’re on Amazon, you could kill two birds with one stone and pre-order your copy of Carnaby, my Young Adult crime novel published under my pen-name, Cate Sampson, by Simon and Schuster on 4th July.
