New client website goes live: News.PSPublishing.co.uk
I'm very pleased indeed to announce the launch of the brand new PS Publishing News Room at news.pspublishing.co.uk.
Built on the Wordpress blog platform, the site is fully RSS-enabled, makes use of various usability-enhancing plugins, and will be updated by yours truly on an ongoing basis in my new role as the PS Publishing website, publicity & marketing guy. I've been running the current PS site for a few years now, but following conversations with Pete and Nicky Crowther at PS, we've identified a number of initiatives and ideas that we want to explore under the general banner of 'selling more books', and they've asked me to take the lead on putting them into action.
It's a role that I'm very excited about getting my teeth into, not least because I've always been such a huge fan of the whole PS Publishing product line since the first title on the list was launched in 1999.
The PS News Room is the first stage of the process, and will enable much faster and wider dissemination of all the latest PS news and information, especially in combination with the ever-growing PS mailing list. Further initiatives are being developed which will come into play in due course, and time allowing I'll be discussing a few of them here, once I've had a chance to implement them and assess their effectiveness. And once we've finished and launched the new PS Publishing Webstore of course...
In the meantime, here's the News Room. Do pay us a visit and check out the latest updates:
New client website goes live: philippalmer.net
Philip Palmer is a new British science fiction author whose debut novel, Debatable Space is being published by Orbit Books in the UK and the US in January 2008. I've read it, and it's an anarchic, mind-bending space opera about revenge. And love, and hate, and killer robots, and sex, and all sorts of other stuff. But mostly revenge. You can read an extract on the site, of course.
I've set up Philip's site - www.philippalmer.net - on a full Wordpress-based blog, because both Philip and the guys at Orbit really get the whole blogging concept. Philip is really interested in the immediacy of the blogging process and the opportunity that it will give him for instant feedback, especially once Debatable Space is out in January.
And it's not like he'll be short of a thing or two to write about in the meantime, either; he may be a debut novelist, but he's also a radio- and screen-writer of numerous years' experience. There are a few posts on the blog already (Philip prepped and posted a few as the design process went along) that talk about subjects as diverse as Spooks, Captain Jack Sparrow and his recent involvement in the production of a 15-minute radio play about the political situation in Gaza.
Here's a screen-shot of the site:
New client, new(-ish) website: www.RichardKMorgan.com
I've recently taken on the management of Richard (K) Morgan's website, which I'm very pleased indeed to be involved with, seeing as I'm a bit of a fan and all...
I was going to start by just transferring the old site onto a new server, but... well, I couldn't resist having a bit of a tinker (as you do), so we've actually ended up with an interim revamp. It's still fairly close to the look of the original site, but I've broken the pages out of the frameset to improve Google spider access, added a bit more info about Richard's books to the homepage and so forth.
There will be a fully re-designed site going live later in the year, with a design that reflects the re-design work that publisher Gollancz have unveiled for the full range of paperback editions of Richard's books, and plenty more bibliographical information etc. Watch this space. And in the meantime, here's a quick shot of the interim site:
Client website update: new-ish look for Brian Ruckley
Orbit Books have finalised the brand new jacket design for the UK and US paperback edition of Brian Ruckley's debut novel, Winterbirth, and they asked me to integrate some of the new artwork into Brian's site design:
I do like the new cover art: I think the imagery reflects the harsh, chilly landscape and bitter, confrontational atmosphere of Winterbirth quite nicely...
Client website updates: Les Edwards & Edward Miller
Spent most of last week with my head down, working hard on the July update for the two sites I run on behalf of Les Edwards and his artistic alter-ego, Edward Miller.
There are about 50 new images across the various galleries on the two sites. Generally, the first few images in each gallery are the new ones (although I'm working on ideas for the best way to make that a bit more user-friendly and obvious). Here are some of my favourites from the new batch:
'This is Now', which was used on a Subterranean Press chapbook of three Michael Marshall Smith short stories given to attendees of the 2007 World Horror Convention in Canada:
The quite lovely artwork for the Subterranean Press edition of Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora:
And here's the artwork for the Gollancz UK edition of Chris Wooding's forthcoming novel The Fade:
They're all 'Edward Miller' rather than 'Les Edwards' pieces, I know, but that's because there's just something in the use of colour, form and texture in the Miller work that really appeals to me.
I also sent Les a few questions for an interview piece, which I posted yesterday evening over on www.uksfbooknews.net. He has some interesting things to say about the use of fantasy art in book design, if you're interested in that aspect of publishing and marketing at all.
And I shouldn't leave without mentioning that Les is having a summer sale between now and the end of September. Buy any of the fine art prints available on either website (the vast majority of the images are available as prints, apart from the pencil sketch prelims and anything where the copyright of the work is no longer owned by Les) and you'll enjoy a 20% discount on the usual prices.