Ministry of Lies

The Ebook is now released - price? £1.99!

See:

The Price of Freedom: Part I: Ghuraj to Arkon When Anda com Durrel is offered the chance to access the forbidden gaming tech and gene-engineered creatures of the insular League of Free Spirits, the opportunity to challenge his brother as head of an entertainment empire is one he can’t resist. His price? Bankrolling the breakout of the son of....

Right... a slight delay. Always the way, hey?

Anyway, publication date is now set at Wednesday 24th April. More details then...🙂

Announcement: Price of Freedom Part 1: Ghuraj to Arkon to be released 19th April... watch this space...

Welcome to the Ministry of Lies - a new independent publisher of science fiction. So, what's it all about? Well, to be honest, it's all about me, the editor, being fed up toiling on the treadmill of trying to get my work published 'traditionally', and deciding to do it myself instead.

"Ah, so," I hear you cry, "a failed writer who's trying to pull a fast one! Typical!"

Well, typical it most certainly is. Look deeply enough, and you'll find that many, perhaps most, small independent publishers were begun by writers motivated by the same reason. Those who have tried to publish will understand my frustrations: the Big Four/Five (and their multiple imprints) generally won't accept submissions unless these come via an agent - and trying to get such gatekeepers to represent you on the basis of your first three chapters (all they'll read) is nigh on impossible. Matters aren't helped by the community of agents being a rather privileged, insular and non-diverse set, whose noses tend to be firmly affixed to the arses of current trends (as they perceive them). Meanwhile, the smaller imprints tend to have very few opportunities, with their tiny capacities and blink-and-you'll-miss-it submissions windows.

So, yeah, sod that.

But in case you doubt my bona fides, I should note that I did manage to sell my first novel to a small American publisher (yes sell: I even got an advance!), and I'm co-editor of the British Science Fiction Association's Fission short story anthologies (with the fearsome and talented Eugen Bacon). Furthermore, in my previous existence as an academic, I published over one hundred non-fiction journal articles and book chapters, and I've had various other editing gigs too. So, it's probably fair to say that if I'm a flop, I'm not a complete one.

But setting up a publishing imprint isn't all to do with negatives. The positives are that I can publish my own works with minimal interference from self-proclaimed experts who think they know better (sometimes they do; often they don't), and ultimately, I'll be able to publish other writers whose works would otherwise moulder in the industry's ignored in-trays (and, yes, I've already got my eye on a couple of targets). And this is important, because what I write - and what I like to read - seems to be of a type once popular but now difficult to find, namely, barnstorming, plot-driven stories of adventure and imagination. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with stories extrapolating from current cultural concerns, but compelling writers to entertain certain tropes and political perspectives only lessens diversity, rather than increases it. The stuff I like doesn’t try to sell a line; it exists to entertain. (It's genre fiction, people, where plot matters: if you want to experiment with language and do mainstream literature, it's thataway...)

Each to his own, I say: you do your thing, but please allow me to do mine.

I'll come back to the topic of what I like in sci fi in my next post, and hence what you can expect from our books.

Won't that be exciting?