Early reviews for Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46

The Abiko Free Press is chuffed that Hana Walker's tale has met with the approval of at least two readers. Much obliged to River for this review on Goodreads and this exhaustive review on ten minutes hate blog.

And feel free to contact Hana directly on Twitter right here. She doesn't bite. Much.

Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46 is live!

It arrived 12 hours early, But we happy few at the Abiko Free Press are not complaining... we are delighted to welcome our latest book into the world, Hana Walker's Half-Life by Our Man in Abiko. It tells the story of an American searching for his abducted daughter at the time of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. It features yakuza, a shinto priest and all the natto you could desire. Visit our bookstore here and feel free to browse the first couple of chapters for free (click on any of the Amazon links in the shop). Just don't spill any ramen on the pages, OK?

Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46 - our first book trailer

Two days until release, so it's probably time to, you know, tell folk about the book and all. This is the Abiko Free Press's first attempt at a book trailer, so be gentle with us, as you can see it hopefully translates some of the excitement that Our Man felt when he first read Hana Walker's manuscript. He just hopes he has done her tale justice. And that she is tucking in to her beloved natto rice balls in the heart of Abiko as we watch this now.

Just got to upload the manuscript to Amazon and everything should be hunky dory (that's an epublishing term we are not familiar with here at the AFP).

Half-Life: Breaking the code

It's 3:29 am, raindrops are smacking against the plastic veranda, but Our Man is smiling.
The manuscript of Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46 has been formatted.
What does that mean exactly?
It means that this:

Will look like this:

It means that a week of learning HTML coding from scratch is over.
It means that Half-Life will not be affected by formatting errors (for example, odd changes in point size or unlinked tables of contents, typically caused by uploading to Amazon directly from a Word file, ahem).
It means the Abiko Free Press has the technical knowhow to release books on multiple formats.
It means it's time to unscrew a Bordeaux before bedtime.

Half-Life 2:46 - the cover

So this is the new cover of Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46, due out in five days. Our Man will leave it to you to decide if it works or not, but he's proud of it. He did it using his daughter's felt-tip pens, a blank sheet of A4 office paper and scanned it in, turning the exposure controls to 11.

Roll on Thursday.

713 reasons to be thankful for our experiment

Releasing Reconstructing 3/11 as a free download yesterday was something of an experiment. On the one-hand, we at the Abiko Free Press believe passionately that books are valuable and therefore their authors should be valued (aka pay the writers, dammit); but on the other, what good is the greatest writing if only the fewest read it?
It's an unsquarable circle. The high command of the Abiko Free Press thought we'd take a middle ground and offer the book for free, but only for 24 hours and see if we could generate a little buzz. Well, don't know about you, but for us we are pleased as punch that in 24 hours 713 copies of the book were downloaded.
Is that 713 fewer paying customers? Maybe. But we prefer to see it as 713 more people who care about the meaning of 3/11 to Japan and its people, and 713 more people who have a better understanding of what the Abiko Free Press is all about.
Many thanks to all our supporters on social media who spread the message. What goes around, comes around.

Reconstructing 3/11 free for a day

For one day only - Monday, June 11th, 2012 - we are offering Reconstructing 3/11 as a free download from Amazon. Download it from Amazon.com here or from Amazon.co.uk here. If you don't have a Kindle, download a free player here for your computer or phone.

It's been three months since the anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. It's understandable that Japan wants to move on and face new challenges. We at the Abiko Free Press couldn't agree more. But... Let's move on with an understanding of where we've been. As Prime Minister Noda endeavors to convince a skeptical country to turn the nuclear power stations back on, it's as important as ever to understand what really happened on 3/11, and what still needs to happen. In our humble opinion, you could do far worse than read Reconstructing 3/11, featuring insights by:

Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice.

Jamie El Banna, founder of Ishinomaki charity It's Not Just Mud.

Philip Brasor, freelance writer with a regular media column at the Japan Times.

Orlando Camargo, senior advisor at Ogilvy & Mather Japan and Re-Imagining Japan.

Michael Cucek, writer of Shisaku, a blog on Japanese politics.

Kiyoshi Kurokawa (with Hiromi Murakami) head of the independent parliamentary committee to investigate the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Richard Smart, journalist.

Nathalie Kyoko Stucky, journalist.

The next big thing...

The Abiko Free Press is very excited to be preparing to release it's third book in just over as many months, the long  awaited (by Our Man in Abiko at least) Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46. Publication date is still being finalized, but it should be available on Amazon within two weeks. More details when they are known.


And stand by for another important announcement expected tomorrow...