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The new scifi novel, When the Children Come is finally available for  on Amazon. Release date is 8th January. Here's the blurb:

Nathan, emotionally scarred after three tours in Afghanistan, lives alone in Manhattan until New Year’s Eve, when he meets Lara. The next morning, he notices something strange is going on � a terrified kid is being pursued by his father, and a girl, Sally, pleads with Nathan to hide her from her parents. There is no internet, no television, no phone coverage. 

Nathan, Lara and Sally flee along the East Coast, encountering madmen, terrorists, the armed forces, and other children frightened for their lives. The only thing Nathan knows for sure is that he must not fall asleep...

�A fantastic and original premise…flashes of Stephen King and MR Carey.� Tom Witcomb

�A nicely taut thriller, with a Lee Child feel to its staccato writing and strong action sequences, and a high concept stretching the novel into true science fiction territory.� Amanda Rutter 

�Not just a page-turner � all in all a fabulous novel, which I was sad to finish.� Loulou Brown

There will also be a blog tour timed with the release, so I'm hoping for some good reviews. Now, I just need to start writing the sequel...

On the forthcoming new novel, When the Children Come, I decided the overall premise wasn't 'speculative' enough, as in thought-provoking. Essentially the book starts off with a kind of Birdbox feel, then transitions into scifi when an alien ship is detected in deep orbit. There are many potential reasons why aliens might come to Earth, and most of these have been done to death before, with such tropes as 'they want to eat us, they want our water, our planet, they want to destroy us because aliens are just plain nasty,' etc. I've already used a variant of one of these for the Eden Paradox series, and wanted to do something different, something new. Something that no one has tried before.Given the body of scifi work, that's a big ask. So, I did research on all the various scifi tropes in films, TV series and of course books, and then I started looking at astrobiological chat-sites...And then I drank a lot of coffee, and came up with something. In part it's inspired by something that happens in the final Eden Paradox book (Eden's Endgame), and is also a bit related to what I want to cover in the fifth Eden book I want to start writing in 2020, Eden's Legacy.I'm now working it into the novel. Happily, it doesn't affect the first two thirds, only the last part. No spoilers. Happy 2020 to all my readers!

The audiobook version of The Eden Paradox was released about a week ago and is already doing well, nudging up next to its digital clone in one of the top ten categories in the UK, and sitting next to John Scalzi in the US. Very nice to see!

I was at a conference the past couple of days and people said 'You should bring it out in Audiobook', and for the first time I could simply say, 'it's done!'

Meanwhile, I've been listening to the book, and it's fascinating to hear all the different accents the narrator (Edward Mitchell) uses, and the way he 'acts' rather than simply reads the words. He really brings it to life like a good story-teller.

I've already decided not to stop with listening to my own books, I'm going to try out for some others as well, probably Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky is first on my list.

At the end of September, all four books in the Eden Paradox series will be launched in audible format. For more information, and for pre-order, click . Must admit, I can't wait to hear them. I was able to be involved in selecting the narrator, which was fun, fitting the voice to the style of the books. The final choice, Ed Mitchell, seemed a good fit for Micah in particular.

Meanwhile, the books are still selling strong, passed the 10,000 sales mark this year alone at the end of August, with most sales in the UK followed by the US. Micah and the rest of the gang are very happy about it!

Two weeks after Amazon started listing the books again, sales are creeping up again - not quite at their June levels, but respectable (1000 sales in the past couple of weeks). Still really no explanation about why the books were de-listed, but once the Society of Authors intervened on my behalf, within 24 hours, four of the books were back on sale, and then the fifth was reinstated as well a few days later. I guess I'll never know what really happened.

Putting this behind me, it's time to restart work on the next series with the first book When the Children Come, which I hope to release for Xmas. An early professional reviewer pitched it as being somewhere between Birdbox and Bodysnatchers, but with more science fiction behind it, and written in a Lee Child style. Not bad...

Well, given the problems with Amazon over the original front cover for Eden's Revenge, the artist (John Harris), agent (Alison Eldred) and I decided to design a new front cover in any case, shown below. This third book opens on the planet Esperia, where the remnants of humanity are overseen by the Assyrians, who live in a 'pyramid-ship'. Well, a picture paints a thousand words, so, here it is (thanks John & Alison):

As some of you have noticed, my science fiction eBooks suddenly vanished from Amazon a couple of weeks ago. This was during a sale when I was selling 150 books a day and around 4000 a month, with the first book, The Eden Paradox, occupying five #1 Best-Seller slots on amazon.co.uk in scifi genre categories such as Cyberpunk, Colonisation, Alien Invasion, etc., and hovering around the top 500 books for around a month.

Someone - I don't know who, as Amazon won't tell me - contested copyright of the front cover of Eden's Revenge, book 3 in the series. Amazon KDP reacted immediately and shut down my account, accusing me of copyright violation, 'which they take very seriously.' Note that they removed all four books. I received the email at 2:11 am, asking for proof, but by the time I awoke at 7am my account was already shut down. By 8am I'd sent them the proof, but to no avail.

Since then I have written to them with further proof that I have the necessary rights to use the cover, as has the artist's agent and even the artist. I have also offered to change the front cover at my own expense, though I shouldn't have to. So far there has been no shift in Amazon's position. It is under final review now, with a decision due early next week. After two weeks of 'robot replies', I have to say I'm not very hopeful.

What is frustrating is that I cannot speak to the people inside Amazon KDP who have made this decision. I don't know what 'evidence' they have, and get no reply when I ask what more I can do or what else they need. I have pointed out that the artist and agent would very much like to know who exactly this third party is who believes they have copyright...

In the meantime, I have had readers writing to me on a daily basis asking where the books have gone. I explain what has happened, and that they can also find them on Apple, Nook and Kobo. Some have switched, others are waiting. However, if Amazon uphold their decision, I'm not quite sure what I do next. I am currently banned from opening a new KDP account.

In scouring the net, I find I am not alone. It is very easy for someone to accuse someone else of violating copyright, and then suddenly your products are de-listed. Getting them re-listed seems to be near-impossible. Someone else pointed out that Amazon has smart lawyers - the 'safe play' is to treat all allegations of copyright infringement as valid, then they cannot be sued by either party...

On a happier note, the books are coming out in audio format later in the year via a separate publisher. I will almost certainly change the cover for the third book.

There is a broader issue here. Amazon is a near-monopoly for eBooks, and authors make Amazon a lot of money. Amazon should reciprocate and have a charter on how it respects and protects those same authors. This could be part of Amazon's corporate social responsibility. As the biggest company in the world, it has a duty of care to all its communities, authors included.

Since I re-branded and re-launched the series at the end of January earlier this year, after an initial slow pick-up, all four books are doing well. By doing well I mean I'm selling 80-100 eBooks a day, and the lead book, the Eden Paradox, is in and out of position #1 in the Galactic Empire sub-genre on Amazon UK and in the top 5 in half a dozen other categories, with book two, Eden's Trial, also in the top ten in a number of science fiction categories. In the US the showing hasn't been as marked, though this morning it was in the top 20 in Cyberpunk, the book's strongest initial category.

So, how did it happen? A ton of marketing? Strong use of newsletters and mass email lists? Extensive use of Amazon paid marketing? A twitter frenzy or blog tour to give a pre-launch buzz?

None of the above.

I'll let you in on a secret. I don't like marketing. I know many authors feel the same way, but we all end up doing it anyway, because the market is in such a state of deluge that if you don't do something, then no matter how great your book is, it won't be visible. If it isn't visible, or, to use the vogue term, discoverable, then people won't buy it because they won't know about it.

Even if you get a deal with a publisher - spoiler alert coming - many of them will not do much for your book, especially if you are a first-timer with them. If it takes off immediately because it has thirty or more 5* reviews via NetGalley when it is launched, and there is a big buzz around it, then it can shoot up the charts from the start, and if it is a good book, it will probably stay there and, well, jolly well done and good for you! But if it doesn't do brilliantly, and they haven't given you an advance they want repaid in sales, then their marketing budget will quickly switch to other books that are doing well or about to be launched. It's a business, and money follows success...

So, back to what I did, but first, some necessary background. This was a re-launch. The books were initially published one a year from February 2011, four books in total. In 2012 there was a spike and I sold a thousand books a week for two weeks, for two of the books which went viral, which was bloody fantastic to watch, but then sales petered out quickly. Nobody seems to know what caused the spike, but hey, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

And then after a couple of years they flatlined, and I was selling a few books a month. There is a word that describes how this makes an author feel. The word is crushed. I had two indie publishers who weren't doing any marketing for the books any more. But I did have some excellent reviews on all four books in UK and US. I figured I'd done okay, that they'd had their day, and that I should move on to other books. And then something tragic happened.

My Mum died.

She'd loved my books, never read one of them, just given me and them that unquestioning love and pride a mother gives and an author yearns for. So, I came into a bit of money, and I thought, holiday? New TV? Car upgrade?

No. I wanted to make her proud. In case she was watching.

I bought back the rights, and paid for some serious artwork to re-brand the books. My favourite science fiction artist is , and he is just awesome, and if you're reading this, chances are you're looking at one of his art pieces on the header. This kind of artwork is not how most science fiction books look these days - they are full of very cool digitally-created pictures. John's are oil paintings. Old science fiction books sometimes looked this way, and I wanted to make a statement, that my books are in a sense a throwback to Asimov and Clarke and Herbert and early Brin, and Jack McDevitt who also uses John Harris artwork. I also wanted my books to stand out on Amazon pages in amongst the 'pack'. They do.

So I re-launched them on Amazon, kindle version and paperback. Aside from the artwork this cost me nothing, as the tools are free. I had to unpublish the original versions, but Amazon kindly transferred the original reviews to the new versions. I did not enrol in Kindle Select, as I wanted to also have the books on Apple, Kobo and Nook. Even though I sell few books there, it's important when doing any advertising to show that you're playing to a wide audience. And some of my friends use these other platforms.

I did a few blogs, sure, and some tweets, but not many to be honest. I tried Amazon's own marketing, where you bid for clicks etc., and that got it off the ground and did make it discoverable, though my ACOS (basically the ratio of what you pay for advertising and what you earn) was never good. I then did some advertising with , and that accelerated things, selling around 10 a day. Initially it was book one, but then of course some readers (not all - I don't kid myself) went on to read the rest of the series. Book Two, Eden's Trial, is very gritty, and I know I always lose a few readers after that one, but those that continue do go on do read books 3 & 4.

I then used for a one-day sale, and sold 160 books in a day, and from then onwards it started selling 30+ books daily, mainly in the UK, and slowly but surely it climbed upwards. Then one day it hit the Best Seller spot (#1 in Galactic Empire), and there was a step change in sales up to 80-120 a day, which is where I am now. I do think there was some luck here, in that at this time both of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books were ahead of mine in the Cyberpunk and Colonisation categories, and these are just such amazing books to be rubbing shoulders with, that I think it gave my books an 'uplift'.

I did try Bookbub, the biggest advertiser, but they didn't accept my ad. Maybe later.

I've kept the price of the ebooks low, with Eden Paradox and Eden's Trial (the first two) at 0.99 (US$, GBP, etc.), while the other two (Eden's Revenge and Eden's Endgame) fluctuate between 0.99 and 2.99. I recently released an Omnibus version (all 4 books in one volume) at 7.99, which is not competitive, but still some people buy it. If ever sales do decrease markedly on the other 4 books, I'll do a sale of this one. At the moment I absolutely won't do a sale on it, as it could be a serious strategic error marketing-wise.

The other thing I did was play with the categories, initially every few days, seeing if I could nudge the books into top 10 slots. Cyberpunk was my strongest, until Eden Paradox made it to #1 in Galactic Empire, and then it got the 'Best Seller' label next to it, and then, well, I just watched the sales take off.

In terms of resources and advice, I should mention that I signed up with for a year and devoured their video tutorials on self-publishing. I didn't do everything they said, but I did take on board their advice on Amazon descriptions and category selection, and played the latter like the stock market, nudging the first book in particular into top 10 categories. Once everything is set up, this is easy to do and takes 5-10 minutes. By the way, Amazon sometimes ignores your category selection, but they are also trying to make money, and sometimes they make a better choice.

Oddly enough, having sold >3000 copies, it has only led to 2 reviews, both 3*, and one of which is double-edged. I don't mind, as I know that many people are reading all the way to the end of the series, so I'm trusting in the silent majority. But it is definitely harder getting reviews these days.

Have I re-couped my costs? Yes! More than that, an audiobook company approached me out of the blue and gave me a nice advance for audiobook versions of all four books.

My Mum is smiling somewhere.

That's about it. It goes without saying that none of this works if your books aren't good in the first place. No promises. Maybe I got lucky. Maybe I had an angel pulling some strings for me. In any case, if you are thinking about re-branding and re-launching, I hope some of the insights here help you. And if you are prepared to do all the marketing razzmatazz I ignored, I'm sure you could do even better.

Best of luck to you!

Barry

Well, if you're reading this, chance is you've already noticed that I've updated the website with the new artwork from John Harris, which also forms the cover art for the omnibus version comprising all four books (on kindle that's over 2000 pages). I haven't done any marketing of this tome yet, as the other books are enjoying a surge in sales, almost 1000 in the past month alone, particularly in the UK but also the US. I think Kalaran must be behind it, it's the only explanation... This blog page, however, is going to keep the original artwork for the series, as I still like it!

Eight years after The Eden Paradox first hit the streets in February 2011, and four years after the finale Eden's Endgame was published, I finally got around to producing an 'Omnibus' version containing all four books. At the moment the individual books are selling well, and it's cheaper to buy them singly than this version, but that may change, and this is intended as something of a collector's item. I was able to gain some fabulous artwork from John Harris, so that now all five volumes use his cover art, and this final cover has a more optimistic feel to it, which you'll understand if you make it all the way through the series.

While editing it all into one tome, I read most of it all through again, and have to say I miss these characters and their fractious universe, and it makes me wonder, and that's all I'm dong at the moment, wondering, but I inadvertently thought of a title, which is a dangerous thing to do, but now it's in my head and I can't unthink it...

Eden's Return.