A BRAVE NEW YEAR WITH BEWRITE BOOKS

As of January 1, 2012, BeWrite Books is an ‘Ebook-First’ publisher ... lavishing the same precision, experienced and talented editorial, design and technical care on its digital editions as it has on its print books since the turn of our new millennium.

In a nut shell, print is now a by-product of our ebook editions rather than vice-versa.

This innovative shift of emphasis is not made lightly. Not by a long chalk. Not by a looong-looooong chalk, folks. We’ve been carefully and diligently preparing for its inevitability. It is also encouraged by our authors and readers.

It comes after impressively successful ebook-only field trials on some BB publications (our biggest seller in a decade is one of these recent ebook-only productions) and with a huge and independent digital distribution base we’ve painstakingly built, store-by-store, according to complex and strict individual technical requirements and legally nit-picking third-party retail contracts, over the past two years.

And it is backed by heavy financial investment in specialized technology, new and vital company registrations, retained professional services ... and sheer hard work and research by the BB team since we focused on this course in 2010.

Make no mistake; BeWrite Books is a serious and progressive house. We've always kept at least one step ahead of the game.

The result is that a whopping 98% of our readers voted with their credit cards and PayPal payments in 2011 to tell us they prefer to buy BeWrite Books in ebook formats than in paper editions.

And sales are going up, up and away. They're greater than ever and getting greater still by the month.

We won’t be pulling out of print immediately or entirely, and Ingram – the biggest book distributor on the planet – will continue to deal with our print editions, although we now find we have higher market penetration than even the mighty Ingram when dealing independently with digital.

When readers loudly send us such a clear message, we have to listen ... and our authors have to listen. We expect the public to read what we offer, so we must extend to them the courtesy of hearing and digesting what they have to say in return. Authors and readers should think of themselves as partners whenever a book is opened. Each *collaborator* merits a fair hearing. And the publisher must quickly adjust accordingly. Agreed?

So we’ve moved the goalposts. A new BeWrite Books author’s title must now prove its literary worth in ebook sales to the general reading public before we will publish a printed edition under the BB logo.

We’re putting the reader in the driver’s seat ... right where s/he belongs.

Our publishing house is now among the first – if not THE first – to retain the Old School values of what’s lately become known as ‘traditional’ publishing, but to initially apply them to ebook production.

We don't blush with embarrassment at the inexperienced self-publisher’s disparaging description of established publishing houses and their expert editors as ‘gatekeepers’. We strongly believe that rigorous selection of submissions is key and that perfect editorial and design treatment of accepted and ultimately published work is the reader’s due. We are proud to be the ‘gatekeepers’ who read and work so hard and long to filter the slush pile for quality rather than leaving that tedious job entirely to the reader, who is otherwise bewildered by tens of thousands of raw manuscripts randomly posted with the tap of a key or two at sales websites purely on the whim of their arrogant ‘authors’. Absolutely unregulated instant ‘publication’ benefits nobody.

(It must be honestly said with humility and all due honor that a very few renowned self-publishers – overwhelmingly those who have built their reputations through large and established publishers and who have the nous to expensively contract pro editors, designers and technicians – must not be written off lightly.)

We also believe that a good book is a good book, whether read on paper or on a handy, pocket- and purse-sized ebook-dedicated reading device or tablet.

Existing BeWrite Books authors and those newcomers to whom we’ve already made informal promises are not necessarily affected by our new digital-first policy and may choose which model they wish applied to their works. But if 2012’s entirely new authors don’t achieve an ebooks sales target within a year of their ebook editions release (or if existing BeWriters prefer the new deal) their print rights will be fully restored and they will be FREELY offered perfectly prepared (covered, edited, proofed and designed), ready-for-print files to use as they will as we continue to distribute and plug e-editions for the remainder of the agreement period.

We don't know of  ANY other publisher offering such a clean and generous agreement. You?

Either way, authors win through much higher royalty payments under the new deal and help BB by unburdening us of loss-making print editions (only two percent of our sales, remember, and very costly to produce and maintain where many more that a hundred titles are involved at any given time), whilst taking advantage of returned print rights and freely provided print-ready files to use elsewhere. We can also effectively and freely cross-promote digital and available print.

We firmly believe that any BeWrite author will agree that we sometimes must play hard-ball before a book is ready to run ... but we ALWAYS play fair. 

As of January 1, you'll find the same. That's when we re-open to new and unsolicited submissions, and you can access the detailed warts-n-all information you need at www.bewritebooks.com and – for some time to come – still at www.bewrite.net. (Should the website appear at all like the old maroon-colored one and without the new, grey-background banner heading similar to that you now see on this blog, please simply refresh your browser. Any hitch; just drop us a line and we’ll talk you through. You all know we're just an email away,)

We think you’ll find our new bookstore section’s presentation particularly stunning, but please do take time to read and understand the other sections, and especially the new submissions and conditions details, now incorporated in a simple, downloadable and shareable e-booklet of 8,000 words of fine detail and advice. We make no apologies for the length of this section you NEED to understand us and up-to-the-minute industry trends before trusting your valuable work to BB.

Also please note our new and free mini-ebooks to help browsers choose and authors to help us promote their work at the click of the button. Each of these small productions carries full color cover, book notes, conditions, reviews, author biography and picture and a free extract. Promo-to-go at the tap of a key. We’re about 70% of the way through the existing catalog and all titles will be covered by their own mini-ebooks by the end of January.

By the way, the new BeWrite Books website can now read your mind ... well, at least it will identify the device you’re reading on and adjust its presentation accordingly. The fancy clockwork is hidden behind the scenes. Our efforts are largely out of sight, to let the website and not the browser do the work.

Also, we’re producing a free ebook very soon to help authors help us in the major job of getting themselves and their books noticed. Obscurity is the author’s Public Enemy Number One. Please take this fact very, very seriously and join us in getting your name and your work out into the bright light of day.

And let’s hope your readers respond with satisfaction, glowing reviews, and maybe even interact by dropping a private line to their favorite BB authors. If they do PLEASE respond to their thoughtfulness and kindness with a personal note,

So here’s to a Happ-E New Year, folks.

 

Best Wishes for the best of years. Neil, Tony, Hugh, Sam

HERE'S TO YOUR B-B-BEST YEAR EVER

BeWrite Books’ team, authors and readers are of all ages, colours, nationalities and creeds. But, unlike the ‘outside’ world, we get along like one big, happy clan.

Maybe it’s our shared passion for books and the fascinatingly different characters populating them, the places and eras we're transported to, the previously unexplored possibilities and visions, that promotes such understanding and mutual respect ...

And that makes life such a wonder-filled trip for us all.

Books sans frontiers!

You’re never alone with a book. It’s a pact between you and an author and his or her support group of editors, designers and technicians.

Reading is a shared experience, an exchange of views and stories, dreams and – sometimes – nightmares. Laughs and tears come with the partnership package as in any close friendship.

When did you last close a book, then not sit and think again about the rainbow of life?

Thanks for making 2011 such a busy and interesting year for BB, folks.

In return, we’ll be presenting you with a spanking new website – chock full of surprises – early in January, and with an increased release schedule of sparkling new titles from some of the most gifted authors on the planet over the coming twelve months.

Have a wonderful holiday time with your nearest and dearest – never forgetting the lonely neighbor down the road and those millions of earth-born companions and fellow mortals to whom the next two weeks will be no more than part of a continual struggle against hunger, poverty, despair and fear.

Love, luck and very best wishes to everyone. We’ll be raising our glasses to all points of the compass when the Hogmanay bells ring in New Year in whatever time zones we find ourselves.

Neil, Tony, Hugh and Sam

HAVE YOURSELF A SCARY LITTLE CHRISTMAS

Author Alan Lewis is wrapping the parcels and preparing a traditional merry Christmas for his children. But he has an altogether different Santa story to tell the rest of us … and it doesn’t ring with jingling sleigh bells and cheerful ho-ho-hos.

BeWrite Books today (December 2) releases – in paperback and all ebook formats – Alan’s debut novel, The Blood in Snowflake Garden; the garden is the park and murder scene at the heart of a bitterly chilling North Pole where nightmares, rather than dreams, come true. Only blood stains its virgin snow.

The Claymore Dagger finalist asked himself the question all authors must: What if? And Alan, who hails from Tennessee’s Chattanooga, chew-chewed over the puzzle; what if Santa was real in another world, what if he wasn’t the kindly, roly-poly, fun-loving and generous character kids believe him to be, what if his elves were little more than slaves, what if flying reindeer were whipped to work … what if … what if?

Back cover text to The Blood in Snowflake Garden tells you what:

In an alternative universe, Santa’s North Pole City is no mere myth.

But the reality has little to do with the jolly image promoted to the rest of the world. The North Pole is a grim industrial complex where worker elves and flying reindeer rarely live happy and long lives … and where Santa Claus is a booze-sodden wreck.

Detective Max Sneed is dragged out of retirement when Vlad Volsky, Premier of gun-free North Pole City, is mysteriously shot to death in Snowflake Garden.

Prime suspect is Santa himself, suffering alcoholic depression after McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts in his universe ban him from US airspace.

During the six months’ long polar night, Max is assisted in his investigation by visiting English journalist, Robert Watson, who struggles to resist the advances of Mrs Claus’s pot-induced horniness and is bemused by the complex social interplay between humans and elves.

Within this universe echo the events of our own turbulent sixties when the winding murder investigation becomes tangled with cold war politics, corporate espionage, bitter worker revolt and a powerful civil rights movement that threatens to destroy the fragile tinsel myth.

Author Alan Lewis

Lewis brings us a North Pole struggling to retain its image in the midst of labor disputes, volatile human-elf relations, a discredited Santa, and now the murder of Santa’s right-hand man. With a little grit and a lot of charm, 'The Blood in Snowflake Garden' is a perfect mix of mystery, mayhem and magic. Jaden Terrell, Executive Director of the Killer Nashville Crime Literature Conference and author of the Jared McKean mysteries

Fans of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ will feel at home in Lewis’s ‘The Blood in Snowflake Garden’. Poet and author Sam Smith

Alan Lewis now lives in Nashville with his children. He authored technical guides and manuals for over twenty years but branched out into fiction. In 2006, he took the reins of a writer’s workshop where he has been striving to teach and aid aspiring authors. He also has several published short stories under his belt and other exciting projects in the works. 

His debut novel, The Blood in Snowflake Garden, was a finalist for the 2010 Claymore Dagger Award presented to the best unpublished murder mystery manuscript. It is no longer unpublished.

As of today it is available in paperback and all ebook formats for all electronic reading platforms from all major online stores, many smaller retails and direct from BEWRITE BOOKS.

Author: Alan Lewis. Editor: Hugh McCracken. Cover, text design and technical preparation: Tony Szmuk. Additional input: The BeWrite Books team. Print distribution: Ingram. Digital distribution: BeWrite Books, Canada and BeWrite Books LLC, USA.

And a personal note from Neil Marr: I wondered over this past week just how far away Alan’s ‘alternative universe’ is from our own. Maybe no more than a cat's whisker.

We’ve just witnessed a Black Friday where riots broke out and pepper spray was used by those battling for Christmas bargains in US stores. As stocking-fillers, many bought loss-leader electronic goods churned out by slave-wage Chinese workers in dismal and dangerous conditions that would shame a captain of industry during the gruesome Victorian Industrial Revolution. Credit cards were maxed out, courtesy of 'Santa the Banka' ... and the whole world now knows the cynicism behind a banker’s ho-ho-ho.

Alan’s answer to the ‘what if?’ question is pretty close to home these days, I reckon.

Find out for yourself by reading The Blood in Snowflake Garden. When you’re bursting at the seams with turkey and Christmas pud, there’s still room to feast on food for thought.

Happy weekend and best wishes. Neil et al at BeWrite Books.

SEXY JOYCE McKINNEY IS MORE FUN BETWEEN THE COVERS THAN ON THE SCREEN

Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris’ latest movie, Tabloid, is now becoming a box-office-buster at cinemas around the US. It’ll be on general release in the UK sometime next year and then aired on BBC TV later. The rest of the world will have to wait.

But what’s the big deal? Morris’ film about a former beauty queen who turned sex-slave-driver barely scratches the surface of the mind-boggling story.

The real fun and games surrounding Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon is in ebook editions from BeWrite Books HERE … at a fraction of the price of a cinema seat, and with cheap popcorn at a microwave oven near you. Paperback is available HERE.

Morris’ documentary has been massively reviewed as ‘eccentric’. But the real McKinney isn’t so much eccentric as downright hilarious. And author Anthony Delano – former boss of the very tabloid press that created the legend of the Manacled Mormon – tells it all, crazy-blow-by-curious-blow.

US beauty queen Joyce McKinney hit the international headlines in the seventies when, love-struck by a straight-laced Mormon missionary, she – and a devoted minder – stalked him to England, kidnapped him (soul-saving Mormon underwear and all) and chained him to a bed in a remote country cottage where the magic underpants were immediately confiscated and Joyce had her whacky and wicked way with him on a regular basis and he, presumably, thought of Utah, Latter Day Saints and hummed hymns.

She skipped bail and fled home to America, under one of her many, many exotic aliases and on one of her many, many fake passports, before she could be fully tried for what amounted to charges of the abduction and serial rape by a beautiful woman of a helpless, God-fearing man she'd held captive and lashed to a special love bed she’d had shipped over the Atlantic for the occasion.

This was no laughing matter. Just imagine the sheer torture the poor and dumpy evangelist must have suffered as he lay there, chaps, hapless and helpless beneath a ruthless blonde beauty queen! And spare a thought for the flustered reporters from the raunchy red-tops who battled it out around the word for the low down on the High Priestess of Kinky.

Great tabloid newspaper fodder was that tale. And, wow, did it hit the headlines big time and long time on both sides of the Shining Big Sea Water! But Joyce herself is just one act in the circus ring.

The real stars are the expert trapeze artists, jugglers and lion-tamers; the crafty, cut-throat and amazingly skilled and resourceful journalists who competed, daggers-drawn (until the pubs opened and they were all pals again), to unravel the weirdest tale even the most hard-bitten had encountered. That's why Errol Morris called his movie Tabloid, of course. McKinney was a mere chorus girl to the main act.

Delano’s book (which fired Morris' fancy when he bought it for three hundred bucks as a collector’s piece when the first edition was out of print) tells all in this new, extended and updated edition ... the tragedy and the travesty, the mystery and the almost unbelievably comic of la crème de la crime.

Joyce is now back in the world news in a big way because of the movie, this book ... and because her true identity was discovered accidentally when she boasted on TV of having a litter of puppies cloned from the severed ear of her dead pet dog. That is one time she wasn't telling fibs and little black lies. Even though she’d assumed yet another alias and changed her appearance to spread the cloning tale, baby-boomers clocked her at a glance.

You can read more about Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon and the author and read the first chapter and reviews in the bookstore section of the BeWrite Books website HERE.

The ebook can be bought from any major online ebook store. It’s available for reading on PCs and laptops, all dedicated ebook-reading devices like Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, Apple iPad, etc, etc, etc, and also on iPods and smart phones. And you can buy it direct from BEWRITE BOOKS in all popular digital formats. Paperback from Revel Barker Publishing is HERE.

Here's a wee bonus from cartoonist James Whitworth’s 'Rudge' cartoon below that pretty well sums up how you might feel after you’ve read Delano’s book or even if you’ve just glimpsed the tip of the iceberg in Errol Morris’ much less rib-tickling documentary …

Happy weekend, folks. Neil et all at BeWrite Books

THE LAST SLIP-UP AS RONNIE BIGGS HOODWINKS THE WORLD BLAGGART BIGGS: THE GREAT BRAIN ROBBER

Biggs Performs for the Press Circus on Thursday

The international press circus performed for world famous gangster Ronnie Biggs’ last stand on Thursday.

Well, not so much a ‘stand’ because the grubby thief and cynical conman, still with an ego the size of a hot-air balloon, is now eighty-two, slumped in a wheelchair and can communicate only by poking a shaky forefinger at an alphabet board to spell out the words he chooses to grace us with.

But waste no tears on this flamboyant and hoodwinking hoodlum. Mr Biggs does not merit the kind of final show as that Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite. Biggs was, and still is, a nefarious showman. Honest Henry the Horse would never do the Waltz for Biggsy. There should be no 'benefit' for Ronald Biggs, which is surely what this 5,000-run book is intended to be. At the price, another £100,000 bonanza for the undeserving.

Biggs is blagging US ... again!

Reporters and photographers from countries as far apart as Brazil and Australia – where he’d lived high on the hog after his prison break – arrived at the London launch of a re-hash of his 1994 autobiography for the apology the Biggs publicity machine had promised for the record-breaking 1963 £2.6m cash heist ($75,000,000 in today’s pocket money). They even expected a promise that some of the proceeds from the expensive hard-backed book would go to the surviving family of train driver Jack Mills, so viciously bludgeoned during the 16-man hold-up that he never recovered from the beating before his death from leukemia just seven years later.

Ronnie Biggs reading Delano's Slip-Up

The press corps had travelled a long way for nothing. They didn’t get either. Instead, Biggsy’s laboriously moving finger wrote that he would be remembered as a ‘lovable rogue’.

And he boldly states in his book, Ronnie Biggs – the Odd Man Out – The Last Straw: ‘If you want to ask me whether I have any regrets about taking part as one of the train robbers, I will answer ‘NO! I will go further: I am proud to have been one of them.’

There’s more HERE, if you can stomach it, and the story is all over today’s media, whatever corner of the globe you happen to be in.

BeWrite Books says that Ronnie was indeed a rogue … but by no means a lovable one. He is the most insidious criminal of our age because he – too often successfully – made the most outrageous and violent of crimes a cause for celebration. He raised applause for cocking a snook at justice and fair play.

He made at least two generations accomplices to The Great Train Robbery.

Why believe a word (supposedly) written by a villain who admits that his entire adult life was dedicated to crime, deception, lies and evasion of responsibility?

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth behind the legend is told unerringly and reliably by former national newspaper chief, Anthony Delano, in SLIP-UP, available in all ebook formats and paperback. Delano’s account is Big News, not Biggs’ news.

Author Anthony Delano

Delano said today: “According to the pre-launch publicity of this new edition of his memoire, Ronnie Biggs was going to ‘apologise’ for the Great Train Robbery. Not just for his part in it but for the whole thing, including the clout on the head that someone gave the train driver.

“Wasn’t Ronnie, of course. He never even got on the train. But he did get away with sacks stuffed with stolen tax-payers' money. More importantly, he got away with not serving the best part of a thirty-year prison sentence.

“Stroke-bound now, he’s said to have revised his biography Odd Man Out by collaborating with a ghostwriter via a letter-board. There won’t be too many fresh words, then, apart from the additional three words to the title; The Last Straw. And we’re still waiting for remorse he will never show.”

By the time Ronnie’s ghost writer, Christopher Pickard (and a few other people), wrote Odd Man Out they had the advantage of discovering exactly how it was that he was able to stay in Brazil rather than growing old in a British prison. They’d read Delano’s blow-by-blow book on the whole shebang, Slip-Up: How Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard Lost Him.

Only after THAT did Biggs know what really happened to make him the world’s most celebrated fugitive.

Ronnie Biggs and the masked mob he was a part of raided the Royal Mail train between Glasgow and London under cover of darkness on a lonely stretch of track and toted off sacks stuffed with banknotes. Police eventually rounded up the gang and the Great Train Robbers were sent to jail for a long, long time. The bulk of their loot was never recovered.

Innocent and bloody, the unconscious Jack Mills was rushed to ER from the UK crime scene of the century. He also never recovered. (I know that because I got to know Jack's wife and family -- they were not criminals; they were like thee and me. They didn't know Dad could go to work and have his head mercilessly bashed in by greedy ne'er-do-wells just for doing the job of driving a late night freight train. They didn't know he wouldn't be back for breakfast that morning,)

But the 'fun' really began when Biggs, with twenty-eight years of his sentence still to serve escaped from one of Britain’s most ‘secure’ prisons, went on the run and became the world’s most wanted man. 

He also became a folk hero as, time and again, he gave Scotland Yard’s crack squad the slip all over the globe by blowing his unearthed swag in hush-money, bribes and living like a celebrity who didn’t want to get out of wherever he was.

As the police farce gave the public mounting glee, it was crack newspaper reporters from the world press hub, London’s Fleet Street, who tracked him down in Australia and again in Brazil, returning with world scoops, while Scotland Yard’s top men returned hapless, empty-handed and red-faced to ridicule.

For thirty-six years, Biggsy lived the good life in Rio de Janeiro, laughing along with his countless millions of fans, basking in glory, and untouchable in a country with no extradition treaty. Whilst swearing loyalty to a devoted wife in England, he sported beauties on his arm at lavish parties where champagne and caviar went down in celebration like tea and doughnuts at gloomy police station inquests into their failures. His smiling face was on tee-shirts – every bit the icon Che Guevara had become by then.

He recorded songs and flouted his glamour-life freedom in world media ... as plodding Scotland Yard blushed and blundered.

Biggs even recorded a song with the sickening ‘Sex Pistols’ called No One is Innocent. It includes the words: “God save Martin Bormann and Nazis on the run. They wasn’t being wicked, God, that was their idea of fun. God save Myra Hindley God save Ian Brady. Even though he’s horrible and she ain’t what you call a lady.” Hindley and Brady tortured and killed children; the horrific Moors Murderers. The couple recorded the screams of their little victims as they died in agony and terror. We know what Bormann and his Nazis did. God save Ronnie Biggs, too, was the message.

Biggs believed his own publicity. But Anthony Delano’s insider story – unique, insightful, often hilarious – is a true, bow-by-blow, account of every slip-off by Biggs, slip-in by the press and SLIP-UP by police.

A major BBC film of the book was hastily blocked by the man in charge of the chase – the famously infamous Slipper of the Yard (unkindly referred to in some circles as ‘Slip-Up of the Yard’) – when he threatened legal action; not because of any inaccuracy in Delano’s work, but because he claimed the actor portraying him went too far in caricaturing him as a clown.

BeWrite Books has released the very first digital editions of the book that became Biggsy’s own favourite (that’s him reading it in fun and sun in one of the pictures carried here), had Biggsy fans in stitches, and is an embarrassment to Scotland Yard to this day.

But the final slip-up wasn’t by the police. It was by Ronnie Biggs this week as he was wheeled into his press conference to launch a new claim to fame, fanfared by Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock, sporting movie star sunglasses, with snazzy skull-and-cross-bones braces clipped to the pants of his flashy suit, expensive designer shoes on his useless feet.

This was a dying man’s last opportunity to express remorse, for a full apology to the country he stole from, to the principle of justice he ridiculed, to the millions around the world he’d hoodwinked into thinking him a modern-day Robin Hood, a promise to turn over every penny the book earns to the family of the late Jack Mills or a charity.

He didn’t rise to the occasion. But with some effort, he did rise to a cynical laugh as the cameras snapped. It had been Biggsy's last chance and our last straw. He laughed in our faces.

Ronnie Biggs is what he always was – a mere skeleton of humanity in fancy dress. A ruthless thief, still living on stolen time.

His mouth hung open and his tongue flopped grotesquely like that of a man swinging from a gallows rope. He uttered not a coherent word yesterday, leaving his Brazilian son. Michael, to play ventriloquist to the dummy. Why should we expect his self-serving book to say anything more than Biggs did in his first and last press conference on the soil of his home country? Nothing.

SLIP-UP. Author: Anthony Delano. Editor: Revel Barker: Ebook editions designed and produced by Tony Szmuk. Additional input from the BeWrite Books Team: PAPERBACK from Revel Barker Publishing

Happy weekend. Neil et al at BeWrite Books