Poke of the Titans

Book three of the SteamDuck Chronicles, and the second title in 12 Books in 12 Months. Archimedes the duck and Finley his telekinetic fish have just survived the crash of Andrew Carnegie's flying locomotive, and find themselves in a strange backwater town called Zuckerstown. It has a fascinating network of tubes connecting every room of every building, and a dark secret: each night another resident is brutally killed in the most horrific of ways. It falls to Archimedes and Finley to solve the crime before they become victims themselves.

The premise, broadly, is the steampunk world infiltrated by Silicon Valley thinkers — great ideas, of doubtful usefulness. The first page sets the tone:

As it happened, Andrew Carnegie's flying locomotive did run out of coal before they cleared Ohio, but luckily, Archimedes was able to save the occupants of his cabin by using the support staff as cushions. Few that day would doubt his bravery, though to be fair, few that day would survive.

"Three hundred an' nine," counted off Finley the telekinetic fish as a short woman finished dropping 900 feet and became substantially shorter on impact, "Those life boats don't work at all, do they?"

This was the first SteamDuck book printed through Lightning Source rather than CreateSpace, which meant giving up the 8.5-inch square picture-book format the first two had used. The page count went from 32 to 48, which gave me more room to play. The paid editions carry a trio of in-character ads for the SteamDuck world, hand-made, and I have heard from several unbiased sources that they are worth the price of admission alone.

Three of the characters murdered in the book are the editors of Boing Boing Gadgets, who kindly agreed to the use of their likenesses and received thank-you copies.

The first-month numbers are a matter of public record, because I published a postmortem on every book that year: 5,303 downloads of the free PDF, 188 eBooks sold, and not one print copy sold through a bookshop anywhere in the world. The two paper copies that did sell were signed ones people asked me for directly. The lesson I took from it was that my SteamDuck readers read digitally and always had, and that the $100 I spent on print set-up bought me nothing at all. Every book after this one in the series was eBook-only.