Crime, fantasy, romance, erotica – sometimes digital publishing really does conform to the stereotype. July's ebook offerings are unashamedly populist and tick all the genre boxes.
The latest self-publishing hit snapped up by the mainstream is Jamie McGuire's Beautiful Disaster (Simon & Schuster, £2.49), an American, Twilight-style love story with a will-they, won't-they couple and endlessly prolonged sexual tension. Virginal student Abby falls for tattooed bad boy Travis but she's fleeing from her past and he reminds her of it, so how can they ever be together? A big hit in the US and out as an early ebook before print publication next month.
Meanwhile, explicit tales of erotic entanglement are legion as publishers chase the market opened up by the runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey, still dominating the bestseller chart. This month sees the launch of Beth Kery's Because You Are Mine, to be published in eight weekly instalments (Headline, ￡£1.49 each); Destined to Play by Indigo Bloome (HarperCollins, ￡£1.99); Marina Anderson's Haven of Obedience (Hachette Digital, £3.99); Diary of a Submissive by Sophie Morgan (Michael Joseph, £2.99); and three collections of erotic short stories by Tobsha Learner titled, with unashamed camp, Quiver, Yearn and Tremble (Hachette Digital, £2.99). The plots involve – well. Do you really need to know the plots?
Bloomsbury is publishing a young American author who developed her fantasy world over 10 years on the site fictionpress.com and so already has a loyal fanbase behind her. Sarah J Maas's Throne of Glass, intended for young adults, sees its heroine, a girl trained as a daredevil assassin, struggling to survive and find love in a savage society. The novel is out in August, but prequel e-novellas are being released on Kindle as well as downloadable free from online magazine Sugarscape. This month's release, The Assassin and the Empire (99p), sees assassin Celaena Sardothien taking on two highly dangerous criminals and, after a gentle start, turns surprisingly dark as the story progresses.
Digital-first publishing is throwing up all sorts of unexpected developments; one such is the arrival of Italian publisher RCS Libri in our midst with Rizzoli First, a digital-first imprint that will publish simultaneously in Italian and English and without DRM. Its first release, Love Will Tear You Apart (£4.99), is a debut by 25-year-old Giulia Ottaviano, set in Milan and featuring Eugenia, 20-year-old heiress and slacker, with a scandal-hit construction magnate father. Crime stories by film director Umberto Lenzi are scheduled to follow.
Occasion publishing is now an option in the digital age. Novelist Julia Crouch penned a story released as a free ebook in honour of the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival held earlier this month. Strangeness on a Train (Headline) tells of a divorcing wife pushed a little too far by an inconsiderate fellow passenger. It's unlikely to have have escaped the publisher's notice that the story will act to raise awareness of Crouch's new paperback, Every Vow You Break, out next month. Similarly crime writer Tess Gerritsen has a July eshort, John Doe, (Transworld Digital, £1.29) which sees her series character Dr Maura Isles facing unexpected danger at a charity fundraiser. A new Isles novel will follow shortly.
July saw ebook prices hit a new low, with Sony and Amazon selling a selection of books, including Alan Hollinghurst's new paperback The Stranger's Child at an astonishing, and controversial, 20p.
By way of light relief, HarperCollins has come up with a novel method of pricing the new ebook of the 1970s cult classic The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart, in which a psychiatrist begins making his life decisions according to the roll of a dice. The publisher promises that the ebook price will be decided the same way each week, with the price dipping when the dice fall low. When I last checked, it stood at £1.99.
