Not to mention a trip to the local climbing wall on Thursday to start training for my Children in Need challenge.
On the writing front there was a slight glitch this week with the roll out of Exiles to retailers which has now hopefully been resolved. Exiles is now available on the itunes store to pre-order and should be appearing on the other sites Smashwords ships pre-orders to shortly.
The one place you won't see my ebooks at the moment is Amazon. They are the subject of a consumer boycott in the UK over tax avoidance. Their UK subsidiary paid £3.2m in corporate taxes in 2012 on sales of £4.3bn - a rate of less than 0.1%. This at a time when we are less than half way through a program of government austerity measures that have seen public services cut, large scale job loses and an increase in the number of people, especially children, living in poverty. Food banks once unheard of in the UK are now a common occurrence.
Obviously given the strength of Amazon and Kindle as a brand it does significantly reduce my visibility and reach in terms of finding an audience. Still I guess like most things in life their are no easy answers and we should be wary of anyone who suggests otherwise. You can of course download a Kindle compatible versions of my ebooks from Smashwords.
On a lighter note I'm working on a new short story 'Silence' which should be appearing on the blog prior to the release of Exiles.