Sold: *Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews*

Infinity Plus Ebooks is to publish, probably before the end of the month (such is the speed of events in this mighty digital age, Jim), a 150,000-word collection of the book reviews I've written over the years. For the last several days I've been editing this compilation, correcting all my typos, toning down a lot of the pomposity, and stripping out at least 5% of the general adolescent snottiness.

Perhaps half the reviews (and some two-thirds of the wordage) were done originally for the webzine Infinity Plus; a further big chunk of the book comprises my reviews for the late, lamented genre-fiction webzine Crescent Blues. The various other magazines represented include Extrapolation, Samhain and SFX. There's also a handful of reviews which were obviously published somewhere but, y'know, er, how can a writer be expected to keep proper records, um . . .

There's lots of discussion about what the "digital revolution" means to book publishing. One of the aspects which I think is too often ignored is exemplified by Warm Words & Otherwise.

I have the touching belief that the book is worth publishing: some of the stuff I've been editing over the past few days is actually, in my modest opinion, worth preserving. Even so, however much I might rosify the tint of my spectacles, a conventionally printed or PoD edition would obviously be a complete disaster; if my mum were still alive it'd be a different story, but since her demise sales have plummeted. An ebook edition at perhaps $1.99, on the other hand, while hardly destined to burn its way up any New York Times bestseller list, has every chance of doing moderately well -- it might sell a few tens or hundreds of copies where a print version would likely sell zero. At best.

Later, when I feel less entangled by flu, I'll try to remember to post a contents list here.