Cairo broke into the top 1000 of Amazon's global sales rank this morning. So thanks, again, to everyone who helped out, which is pretty much all of you.

Now, I just need to get rid of Stephen King and Philip K Dick.

They're always standing in my way, those bastards.

I'll be heading off to the airport in a couple of hours to take flight for Sydney. Hoping to get the final files for the Hooper ebooks before I go. It'd be nice to give them a push at the festival.

It's not officially released for a couple of weeks yet, but you just can't contain this beast. It has escaped. You'll find copies in random bookstores, mostly indies, I'd guess. But for anyone looking to grab one online I've reordered the shelves at my private bookstore. For now the links go to preorders. Best way to get one immediately is the old fashioned way.

I'm in Sydney for the Festival from Thursday arvo, but they've got me running around a lot while I'm there, and doing gigs both nights. I'm more likely to be free for a catch up when I return in Jul/Aug.

In related news, Cairo is doing very well. It's hovering around the top five in the categories I chose for it (alternate history and time travel) with my path to the top blocked by Stephen King and Philip K Dick.

I can live with that.

I had an email from Jason Lambright, a reader (and now a writer), who had some kind words about Weapons of Choice, which helped get him through his time in some of the dustier parts of the world.

He writes, "I always carried my Sony Ereader in my assault pack along with grenades, flares, extra ammo, etc. It was always with me until it got fragged in the Andarab Valley (adjacent to the Panshir) in Afghanistan. Here is a photo I took in a village by the Konduz river, you can't see it but my assault pack (and my trusty ereader with your books on it) was in the turret with me."

Jason came home (Huzzah!) and set to writing some sci fi (Huzzah x2!)

The novel is called In the Valley and you can hit up the text link or the ad below to grab it. It's old fashioned military sci fi. The Dirty Dozen on the final frontier. I'm going through it now, making some notes to send him. You can just buy it, read it and enjoy it. Then go give him some reviews.

Go on. It's the least you can do.

Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone who left a review on Cairo. It pushed the book up the popularity ranks, which gave it enough visibility to get into the Hot New Release listing. I'm pondering how to reward y'all.

One of the things about going back into the Axis of Time series is the frustrating delight of contemplating all the technologies I missed. We didn't get fusion stacks. Instead of Posh we got Siri and Alexa. We did get flexipads, but we got them in the form of mobile phones.
Still, I don't see any point in slavishly adhering to the canon. So in Cairo we read a lot of detail about the mil-grade cell phones being used by Harry, Julia and Viv. I'm not sure flexipads are mentioned, and I'm certain that data slates are not. Nobody has complained yet.

So one of the things I'm enjoying as I return to the series is finding stuff that I can sneak in under the retcon radar. This bio-gel refrigerator concept for Electrolux, by Russian designer Yuriy Dmitriev is a great example.

Bio gel technology gets a few mentions throughout the original novels, enough to let me get away with putting something like this in the later books. Of course you can't build something like this with 1950s augmented technology – or at least I don't I think you can – but the nice thing about well-made refrigerators is that they run for years. And this bad boy doesn't even have any moving parts to break down. I can totally see Vice President Kohlhammer having a big green beer fridge just like this in his office. He couldn't keep his Heinekens in there, though. You'd never be able to find them.

Cairo went on sale today. Not that I expect to sell many copies initially, having just given away a couple of thousand freebies. But I do have my schemes and plots and cunning plans.

Initially, the book will only be available on Kindle, specifically in the KDP Select program. This means the Beast of Bezos get’s a grant of exclusivity for three months in return for some promotional juice and a better royalty deal. (Although, to be fair, Amazon’s royalty split is much more generous than any trade publisher).

I figure that having given away so many copies I’m better off parking it in Select for a couple of months until Paris comes out. I can then drop the price from $3.99 to either a buck or even to free. Why do this? Because free downloads count towards a books ‘popularity’ which helps with its visibility on various lists and charts. If you climb those charts you can generate enough momentum to sell a bunch of copies on the downside once you put the price back up again.

I could go into eye watering detail, but I won’t.

I sent out an email asking for reviews to the first 300 subscribers on my mailing list, which basically means to the regular readers of this blog . Again, these help with the arcane business of working the book’s mysterious popularity rating (but not it's sales rank. That is determined only by sales). So if you see this before you get the email, or if the email ends up in your spam trap, feel free to do me the courtesy of a decent reach around.

You'll find it here and on the other end of this Amazon link... (Unless, like me, you have an ad blocker installed. I really must get around to white listing my own site one day.)

I didn’t get much writing done today. I spent most of the day either working on this, writing a quick one-off column for The New Daily, and doing an interview for Channel 9 about Australia Post. Hoping to get back to Paris tomorrow.