Free books in India – Occult, Sci-fi & Military

Inchoate is finally published in Urdu

I am over-the-moon to announce that Inchoate, my science fiction story about a time-traveling paleontological investigator, is now available FREE and in Urdu. My deepest and sincerest thanks go out to Atiya Adil, a teacher, for undertaking this huge task and seeing it through to its conclusion. It is extremely satisfying to see this project come to fruition after such a long period of sustained effort.

I have long wanted to provide a free and representative sample of my work to people in Asia and the Middle East, of whom I seem to have many followers (I have more followers in Cairo than any other city and more followers in India than any country other than the UK and USA). I frequently see mountain-loads of downloads in these countries during my free promotions so I know the readers are there and I also know that getting online credit to buy books, let alone having the outlet to buy them, is not easy there. Now, these readers should be have both.

Below is just a short excerpt from the Urdu version. Continue reading “Top Quality Science Fiction in Urdu?” →

I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of translation services on the internet and the quality of those that do exist. For some time I have been gaining a disproportionately large number of fans in Egypt and India. I don’t know why this is, but that’s hardly the point. If these people are interested in me, then I want to publish something that is easy for them to read. In other words I want to publish in their languages: Urdu and Arabic.

You are probably thinking; what’s the point? If they understand English then they can read it and if not, why bother? Well, I just feel that they deserve it!

Until now I have used Google Translate – http://translate.google.com for twitter and Facebook posts. It’s okay for short posts but as everyone probably knows by now, it’s not great. If you have ever received spam from a fake Russian girl looking for a boyfriend you will know what I mean. The result is a sort of gobble-de-gook; a soup of phrases that overlap each other and mean little. I recently tried to translate a tweet into Chinese and then translate it back to see how good/bad it was. I had to make several attempts before I could get anything that retained even the basic meaning of what I was saying! Continue reading “How to get my stories into Arabic or Urdu?” →