Born to Lose: Tales of Gigi collection now available to pre-order
My upcoming short story collection, ‘Born to Lose: Tales of Gigi’ is now available to pre-order on Amazon. Well, the eBook is anyway, with the paperback to be put up for pre-order as soon as possible.
The collection has a provisional release date of Sunday 16 February. Yes, an odd day I know, and as the stories themselves are all finished, I am not expecting this to slip. This release has also seen me move away from Ingram Spark and go directly onto KDP. The downside being that it won’t be a wide-release like ‘The Eighth Hill’, but I found that Ingram’s reporting platform was both slow and lacked detailed. How many sales came through Amazon and how many were via other platforms? I have no idea.
For ease and (hopefully) improved tracking, I have switched and I’m guessing most purchases (hah) came through Amazon. I am not expecting it to affect my sales negatively. While I appreciate not everyone is a fan of Amazon, and their concerns are legitimate, I felt that as an independent release, the platform will give me the best chance of promotion and sales.
Right, enough jibber jabber, what about the book itself?
Well, it contains 11 stories which go from short vignettes to full novelettes, and all with the central character of Gigi the loser. That’s right, the minor character (played by Ugo Fangareggi) that featured in Dario Argento’s 1971 giallo film, ‘Cat O’ Nine Tails’. As I’ve mentioned before, this all started off with a short story idea while I was stuck in a traffic jam on my commute to work, and then snowballed into something bigger from which I developed my version of the character taking only the nickname and concept.
Although as the volume of stories grew, so did my concern. Not for plagiarism, as I was comfortable I hadn’t committed that - after all, these were all my own stories - but for intellectual property theft. It was Dario Argento, Luigi Cozzi, and Dardano Sacchetti, who came up with the idea of the man and not me. Still, right until the last moment, I had shied away from referencing the film or their creation, but then I thought, why not embrace it?
So, at the last moment, I added in a vignette and a flash fiction piece that directly relates to the film (one is based on a throwaway sentence and the other is Gigi’s introductory scene) and for that I hope the trio forgive me - and equally importantly allow me. For this, I want to be transparent about my intentions and where their ideas end and my creation begins. Once the final versions are in my hand, I hope to send the men copies of the book to gain their approval, or at the very least, to show them it is out there and that their influence continues on.
The details
You can pre-order the ebook of ‘Born to Lose: Tales of Gigi’ for £1.99 from Amazon, and I’m expecting the paperback to be around £6.99. Not bad value if you ask me. As I don’t know which territory you are reading this from, just search for ‘Born to Lose: Tales of Gigi Turner’ on your local Amazon and the wonderful artwork by Marco Marella will show up.
