Unpublication

I’ve been slow to provide purchase links for my new hard-SF short story collection, Wide Brown Land: stories of Titan. There’s a reason for that: two days ago, I was dropped by the book’s publisher, Peggy Bright Books, who have promptly removed almost all mention of the preceding collections and novellas of mine which they had published over the years. I’m still in the dark as to why this decision was made, though it seems unlikely to have been made on purely financial grounds. While I continue to respect PBB as a publishing house—they have been very good to me over the years—I can no longer direct prospective purchasers of my books to the PBB site as a purchase option, because the books are suddenly no longer available through them.

Where this leaves the wider availability of the titles—which at this stage largely means their presence on Amazon—I’m as yet unsure. At time of posting, none of my titles (Rare Unsigned Copy, Difficult Second Album, Flight 404, The Gordon Mamon Casebook, Matters Arising from the Identification of the Body, Wide Brown Land) has yet disappeared from Amazon, but the wheels of behemoths grind slow (if indeed behemoths have wheels) and so I cannot yet be sure that any paperback-copy options will reflect a title genuinely obtainable from the distributor. (If I receive clarification on this matter, I’ll provide an update.) And both Matters Arising and Wide Brown Land are still showing as ‘available’ through other sites such as Book Depository and B&N. The ‘instant gratification’ option of an e-book purchase of any of the titles (mostly restricted to Amazon, though Wide Brown Land is, I believe, also available elsewhere) would, for the moment, appear more secure: if an ostensibly-available e-book title isn’t deliverable, then I would assume the transaction is voided. For what it’s worth, here are the Amazon e-book links for my recent Sir Julius Vogel Award winning novella Matters Arising, and for my brand-new Titan collection, Wide Brown Land. While I hope that they will continue to remain available into the future, I cannot for now be certain of that.

Further clarification, I hope, will follow.