Dispatch from the Razor's Edge, the Blog of Michael Stephen Fuchs
D-BOYS Preview
(Another Damned E-Book)
Plus: E-Books In Every E-Store
Plus: E-Book Revolution Update

I'm happy to announce the publication of a special sneak preview of my forthcoming (keep touching wood there) novel, D-BOYS.   (*)

This one's free as the clouds. How's that for a price point to hit? Like, the others it's available for the Kindle reader (for any conceivable device). Or you can grab it from Smashwords in the format of your choice (HTML, Kindle, ePub, PDF, Sony Reader, etc…). Or also on iBooks for your iThing.


Here's the jacket flap copy for you:


The world's most elite counter-terrorist operators.
A cyber-security guru suddenly getting shot at and blown up rather more than usual.
And nuclear-armed terrorists rolling with impunity through a lawless and brutal virtual world.

The year is now. Islamist terrorists hack into America's most sensitive defense networks, launch chemical weapons attacks on Western cities, and stage a raid on the vulnerable nuclear weapons storage facilities in Pakistan. They are using a massively-multiplayer online video game (or "virtual world") as a platform for planning and rehearsing their attacks – forcing a squad of supremely elite Delta Force operators (reinforced by an info-security expert from the Department of Homeland Security) to go inside the game to fight them.

But the fight only begins there. Michael Stephen Fuchs' forthcoming novel is a high-tech special-forces nuclear terror thriller - featuring perilous night-time supercarrier landings, clockwork safehouse takedowns in bandit country, combat helicopter assaults into north London mosques, virtual fights to the death for control of an enormous dry dock in the largest first-person-shooter online video game of all time, breathless aircraft shoot-downs in the remote mountains of Pakistan, brutal and precise close-quarters battle sequences, waterborne SEAL Team assaults of hijacked super-container ships, Predator drones with real-time video feeds to smart-phones, and CheyTac Intervention sniper rifle systems that can kill you from a mile and a half away.

Are you ready for D-Boys? Get an advanced preview of the incomparable adventure, today.


E-Books E-verywhere

Here's a list of the e-stores where you can e-buy which e-books.

  • Amazon: Everything – the indie titles plus the properly published Macmillan titles.
  • Barnes&Noble: Just the indie titles.
  • iBooks: Everything – indie and Mac! Very exciting. Just search for me from your Bookshelf in your iThing. You can also get quite long-ish previews sent to you for free. Finally, they'll also give you the D-Boys preview for the correct price of $0.00.
  • Smashwords: The indies.
  • Sony: The indie titles are supposed to be there, but aren't showing up yet.
  • Waterstones: The Macmillan titles.
  • WH Smith: The Macmillan titles.

Revolution Update

The Independent E-Book Revolution seems to be going gangbusters. The semi-official posterchild is Amada Hocking, who – with no publisher, no agent, and after having gotten turned down by every publishing house in New York – has now sold just shy of million books.

Unfortunately for me, at the moment, I've now sold just shy of, well let's charitably agree to call it several orders of magnitude fewer books. Is this going to be another winner-take-all economy, as is traditional publishing? (Where a handful of authors account for the vast majority of all book sales?) It's early days yet, I suppose. And no one quite knows what the winning formula is. Which I suppose is a good thing.

Closer to home, Ian Hocking – having been another great, promising author that the publishing industry chewed up and spat out – has quickly sold 1,000 copies of his novel Déjà Vu, so that rocks.

Also definitely worth noting is John Locke. Guy came absolutely out of nowhere: again, no publisher, no agent – and, in his case, absolutely no desire or intention of ever getting them. He saw independent e-book publishing as the business opportunity of the millennium, and undertook to make himself the King of E-Books. And he is: all six of his titles have lingered in the Kindle Top 100 bestsellers list, including three in the top 10. (*)

Even more compellingly, at the time of writing this (admittedly several weeks ago now), 27 of the Kindle Top 100 sellers were by independent authors – no publishing house and (in most cases) no agent. Just writers connecting with readers. That's pretty damned amazing.

Oh, here's a dialogue with thriller writer Barry Eisler – who just turned down a $500,000 advance from St. Martins Press to independently publish. Money has emphatically met mouth – and everything has changed in an eyeblink.


  books     e-books     my books     publishing industry     d-boys  
about
close photo of Michael Stephen Fuchs

Fuchs is the author of the novels The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation); the D-Boys series of high-tech, high-concept, spec-ops military adventure novels – D-Boys, Counter-Assault, and Close Quarters Battle (coming in 2016); and is co-author, with Glynn James, of the bestselling Arisen series of special-operations military ZA novels. The second nicest thing anyone has ever said about his work was: "Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt put in a firefight'." (Kirkus Reviews, more here.)

Fuchs was born in New York; schooled in Virginia (UVa); and later emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived through the dot-com boom. Subsequently he decamped for an extended period of tramping before finally rocking up in London, where he now makes his home. He does a lot of travel blogging, most recently of some very  long  walks around the British Isles. He's been writing and developing for the web since 1994 and shows no particularly hopeful signs of stopping.

You can reach him on .

THE MANUSCRIPT by Michael Stephen Fuchs
PANDORA'S SISTERS by Michael Stephen Fuchs
DON'T SHOOT ME IN THE ASS, AND OTHER STORIES by Michael Stephen Fuchs
D-BOYS by Michael Stephen Fuchs
COUNTER-ASSAULT by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book One - Fortress Britain, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Two - Mogadishu of the Dead, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN : Genesis, by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN Book Three - Three Parts Dead, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN Book Four - Maximum Violence, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN Book Five - EXODUS, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN Book Six - The Horizon, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Seven - Death of Empires, by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN : NEMESIS by Michael Stephen Fuchs

ARISEN, Book Nine - Cataclysm by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Ten - The Flood by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Thirteen - The Siege by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN, Book Fourteen - Endgame by Michael Stephen Fuchs
ARISEN : Fickisms
ARISEN : Odyssey
ARISEN : Last Stand
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 1 - The Collapse
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 2 - Tribes
Black Squadron
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 3 - Dead Men Walking
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 4 - Duty
ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 5 - The Last Raid
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