Frequently Asked Questions
Things you never knew you never wanted to know
1) What is the ‘Edgeverse?’
The Edgeverse is a literary universe where there are strongly established rules about how things work. It’s a wide universe and some of the stories are set in the present, while others are way forwards in the future. The future technology and history are established so that all the books exist in the same, recognisable world. It’s like the movies and books set in the Star Trek or Star Wars universe, they all have their own unique look, style and feel. The Edgeverse is the same, it begins with the novel, ‘The Edge’ and builds from there.
Also, kind of confusingly, Edgeverse is a publishing platform for the best new authors that you’ve never heard of… Us…
2) What free books are there?
All of them! Our short story collections were written to be free, we never had any intention of selling those. ‘A Novel Approach’ is a guide to creating a high-quality piece of literature and is aimed at helping new authors to improve their standard. Again, we never hoped to make money from it, we purely intended that it help other writers.
As well as all of those books being free, all of our fiction can now be read on our site, without signing-up, logging in, handing us your email address, promising us your first-born son, swearing allegiance or pledging your sword in battle.
3) What are Blips?
Blips are short stories that are less than 2000 words in length (or more, or whatever). Generally they have science-fiction themes, have a sense of macabre humour and will have a twist in the tail or some other kind of final reveal. Often they will make a satirical point about something.
Blips are free to read on the site and there’s a whole novel based around them. How cool is that? (Not very.)
4) Why are all of your books free?
We live in a horrible time where people are dumber than they were a few decades ago, games are free on their phones and books are cripplingly expensive. Even though books are becoming ridiculously over-priced, most authors make almost nothing from them.
Even with our background and experience, we have not been able to get a publishing contract with a large publisher and have been told by insiders that we never will as we’re the wrong demographic.
With all that in mind, we decided the best option for ourselves, and future publishers, was probably to give books away and allow our audience to buy a better quality version if they decide they want to.
It also shows people that we have faith in the work, we believe in our books and are confident that they’re as ready for the audience as they can possibly be.
5) Why would anyone buy your books if they're free?
Some things are better than free. Yes, you can read our books without paying us anything on the site, but that’s probably not the best way for most people. For that reason we offer them on multiple platforms such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
As an example of this, people can listen to music for nothing on the radio but it’s not always at their convenience and that’s why they buy the music they enjoy. We hope you enjoy our work enough to consider supporting us but either way, we’re writers and we really just want to write…
6) How do I buy your books?
You can buy our books on Amazon. Our books are all available on Amazon Unlimited, meaning you can read them by buying the whole, entire book or read it one page at a time to decide if you like it enough to keep reading. We’re working on getting paperback available and are branching into other sales outlets.
7) Will you write poetry?
No. Stop asking that.
I mean, we have Al Warcock who is an entirely (ahem) real person (ahem) and not just a satirical comment about how awful modern poetry has become. We feel that his book, ‘The World About Turns’ pretty much says all we could possibly say on the matter, and it’s free.
8) What is 'Buy Me a Coffee?
‘Buy Me a Coffee’ is a platform that lets you make a donation to us, in order to help keep us doing what we’re doing, or to help inspire us to stop, or whatever motivation drives you. We make no promise to actually spend it on coffee and equally (or more so) cannot guarantee that it won’t be spent on alcohol.
Actually, quite boringly, most of our spare money, that we’re not pointlessly squandering on food, is spent on building this site and advertising our material. So actually, every donation goes towards helping us to build this up so that we can continue to expand and help take on talented new authors who are willing to create free content.
9) What is A-holes?
A-holes is a fictional, but brutally honest account, of teaching English in a foreign country. It’s a dark, comedy-drama set in an unnamed country and it shows the story of a teacher in his first year of teaching. It’s based on the personal experiences of the authors when they both taught the language abroad.
What’s special about this book is that all proceeds go directly to a charity that sponsors the education of Cambodian children. If you buy a copy, all profits will go towards sending a child to school.
For this reason, it’s the only one of our books that isn’t available for free, but you can read a free sample to see if it’s right for you.
10) What’s the benefit of writing in a cohesive literary universe?
The benefit of a literary universe is that all the rules are established, which means all of the stories link together nicely. All the future alien races, all the technology that powers the space-craft, all the things that can be done at all the various points in future history are established. This means that the authors can focus on the stories and making sure that they are the best they can be, without constantly focusing on building a literary world.
11) What kind of thing are the articles about?
Well, we’re authors, so most of our articles are aimed at helping other authors be all they can be. We’re offering the benefits of the lessons we’ve learned the hard way, on our long, lonely, cold journey to absolutely nowhere. At the very least, learn to avoid making the same mistakes that we’ve made.
We also have articles on the things we enjoy, such as pop-culture, movies, books, motorcycle and other things.
12) What’s happening in the future?
Providing that society doesn’t collapse, we’re planning to complete a lot more work. Sequels are planned for ‘The Edge’ and ‘Rob and Dave’ and we have several new novels coming soon. We’re also planning a few special projects that will be completely unique to this site.
Keep checking the updates and join our newsletter for more.
13) Why do so many of your articles have such a spiteful and sarcastic tone? Are you just arseholes?
Yes.
14) What happens if I read one of your free novels and still feel like I deserve a refund?
You can go fuck yourself. Also, thanks for reading our novel
15) Is Carolina Sorn a real person?
We’re pretty sure she is. Jack was sadly fortunate enough to teach her through Grade 10 and 11 where she excelled at English and was pretty much entirely useless at anything else. At some point she became his son’s Godmother and it was more or less pointless to think he was ever going to get rid of her after that.
She worked on her first novel, with Jack pointing things in the right direction by doing far more of it than he had originally planned. Edgeverse decided to publish it since nobody else probably would, mostly to make up our diversity quota-or something.
But, for all this, Carolina Sorn is a really real person that you can follow on Facebook, talk to, see pictures of and smash into with a car, if you are that way inclined.
16 What are your qualifications?
Jack has a long obsession with reading and writing. In his twenties, he had several science-fiction novels published which are currently out of print. He has been a content writer for magazines, websites and even education and government documents, as well as working as a professional ghost-writer.
He now works teaching English, novel-analysis and writing and is a best-selling travel author.
Seth has been a professional content-writer and editor for decades, working on various background material for such a large corporation that it’s almost impossible that you haven’t read some of his work at some point.
Together they write fun, entertaining fiction that primarily interests them. For absolutely nothing, you can find out more for yourself.