Technological Scary Biscuits by Susan Price

Technology. How can you not love it? Space-craft on meteroids -

The Ghost Drum in paperback

even if it did fall over. And - an even greater achievement as far as I'm concerned - my book, The Ghost Drum, available in paperback again, after years out of print.

I knew when I finished it that it was the best book I'd ever written - though now, having re-read them all as I turned them into e-books, I think that its successors, Ghost Song and Ghost Dance, are, in some ways, better. Ghost Song is, I think, more lyrical and poetic, while Ghost Dance is altogether darker, with a more complex story. They were originally published for children but none of the books are particuarly childish.

Although they're 'fairy-tales' of a kind, they're based on the often bitter and cynical older stories, which were told by adults to adults, and reflected a kind of magical-realism response to often hard lives.

All the books were published in America, as well as the UK. They've been translated into Danish and Japanese. They have, at various times, had film-options on them - Ghost Drum is under option at the moment. They were reviewed well, and have been called 'classics.' But they were allowed to go out of print. (I'm becoming quite used to people saying, and writing, to me: 'Why on earth did publishers allow a book like that, a Carnegie winner, a classic, to go out of print?' Well, I don't know any more than anybody else does.)

My agent clawed back the rights, and we offered them to publishers again. I wrote another book, as yet unpublished, called Ghost Spell, and we offered all four as a package. My agent was sure she could sell them - but there were no offers. Publishers said it would be too expensive 'to get the franchise up on its legs again.' I had no idea my books were a franchise. Or that franchises had legs.

So I turned the first three books into e-books. There's the first cheer for technology. And for Amazon which, for all its many faults, not only saw that this was possible, but went ahead and made it possible for anybody to sit on their sofa, upload a file and publish their book as an ebook - at no upfront cost. And for other people, anywhere in the world, to sit on their sofas - or lie in their beds - or sit in a hotel lounge or on a train - and download that same file into their e-readers.

Amazon, a predatory business shark - let's never forget that - nevertheless saw a sharkish advantage in throwing open their website, with all its advertising and distribution machinery, to anyone who wanted to use it, virtually for free. And we seldom stop to think just how amazeballs - how gobsmackingly amazeballs - indeed, how scary biscuits - this is. It's all down to the technology - technology changing the shape of business and the world as surely as the first stone tools, and then the first Bronze tools, did.

Some people believe that Amazon is making fools of us all - that we are all silly little minnows gambolling into the mouth of the shark, and we will be sorry, oh yes, very sorry, by and by, because

Vandals, loitering. Well, Huns actually.

our foolishness will result in the downfall of culture as we know it. The vandals, in fact, are at the gates - where they've been loitering about, smoking and up to no good, whenever any great change has occurred, for centuries.

These people may be right. I have no idea how the 'e-book revolution' will eventually pan out. Neither has anyone else. Maybe it will all end in disaster. But, in the meantime, I have to say: What Chutzpah! What audacity. To see that it could be done - and to go ahead and tear into all the vast organisation that must have been necessary to make it work, and just do it. To ignore all the doubters, all the nay-sayers, all the despairing and warning howls from the wilderness, and just do it.

Amazon went further. They set up the machinery to make it possible to turn the file sat on your computer - the same one you turned into an e-book - into a publish-on-demand paperback book. At no upfront cost to the author. And then made it possible to sell it, world-wide, through Amazon's warehouses and website. I was

The Wolf's Footprint, paperback cover

slow to take them up on this - but when lots of teachers started contacting me to ask where they could find copies of my OOP book, The Wolf's Footprint, I started thinking about it.

First, I made it an e-book. But then I tackled the mountain - well, it's at least a small, steep foothill - of learning how to turn my e-book into a paperback. As always, I hauled in my brother as cover artist and illustrator.

It was harder than doing an e-book - or is it just that I've forgotten how hard I found producing an ebook when I first tried? I think it may be. I remember texting my younger brother, after midnight, with exclamations of despair. He replied, 'You'll get there. Goodnight.'

Anyhow, The Wolf's Footprint has been on sale as an e-book since early this year, and it sells well. But once the paperback was on sale, I found that it sold as well, if not better, than the e-book. We Authors Electric are all so keen on ebooks, we sometimes forget - I certainly do - that there are still whole town's-worth of people who never use computers, don't have e-readers, and want to buy paper books. So it occurred to me that I also ought to publish the Ghost World books as paperbacks. And preferably before Christmas.

But I was busy with workshops and it slipped my mind - until I realised, with a shock, that it was already November. So I set about getting the job done, downloading templates and getting on the brother's case.

I sat with him the other day, witnessing another staggering piece of technology in action. He had his cover for Ghost Drum on his computer, divided into many layers. He slid layers aside, or laid them over one another. He changed fonts in an instant, changed colours, increased transparency or opacity. He took up a tablet and a stylus and used it to sketch in a new outline and to erase others. He added the book's Carnegie Medal as a 'button' on the back. And then we uploaded it to the CreateSpace site in less than a minute. We've come to take this for granted, but it's staggering. It is euphoric gravy.


And Ghost Drum is now on sale on the Amazon site, as a paperback, less than a month after I set out to turn it into one. It isn't a careless rush-job either, because I was using a file that had already been proofed and edited when it was made into an e-book.

With conventional publishing, you couldn't even get a publisher to tell you that they were turning the book down in less than four months.

So let's hear it for technology.

Find the Carnegie Medal winning 'The Ghost Drum', in paperback, here.              UK                    US