After the signing at the Trafford Centre last Saturday I’ve been working hard to prepare some of my back catalogue for the Kindle reader. As I’ve said before, it seems that a lot of people have received one of these over Christmas 2010 and they look set to do for books what downloads did to music. To that end, I’ve sold more Kindle copies of ‘Bringing home the stars’ for the Kindle reader in the last week than I did in the last six months, according to the publisher.

I was already doing a lot of editing for new editions, but that got stepped up a pace. Today the finished edit of ‘The Atlantic Connection’ was uploaded today for the Kindle, and should go live to buy by the end of tomorrow. All-in-all that bodes well for the signing in Preston on this coming Saturday. My hope is that people who buy on the Kindle will be tempted to buy more than one of my books, and there should be a resultant increase in Kindle sales as a result.

With ‘The Atlantic Connection’ done, I’m working hard on a Kindle copy of ”Orb of Arawaan’ which was always a bit of a behemoth of a book, coming in at nearly twice the length of my other books. It’s early days, but I’m pleased to say that I’m actually pleasantly surprised at this one. I’m reading through it, and there isn’t an awful lot of changes that I feel need to be done, other than to correct a few of the usual typos that seem to get into first editions. It’s a really good story, even if I say so myself! If I can continue the pace today and tomorrow, there’s every chance that the publisher can get it uploaded over the weekend so that by the Wigan signing I’ll have three books on the Kindle.

I’m quite excited by it all – a new dawn of selling books! The last book that I definitely intend to go through to put up on Kindle from the back catalogue is ‘Countdown to Extinction’. This will be the earliest book on there, and might need a lot of editing to make me happy enough to re-release it. Writing is like anything else: the more you practice at it, the better you get. My style has changed, and I have got better. That’s one of the reasons that some of the other books might eventually get completely rewritten rather than just a heavy edit. I feel a little about my earlier work as to how Terry Pratchett seems to have felt when he went back to do a new edition of ‘The Carpet People’.