The Lord of Billionaires' Row

(Now also available on smashwords.com in multiple E-book formats!)

The Lord of Billionaires' Row is a novel by the blog author, which grew out of his further research into his blog article "Buy to Rot" published in February 2014. The article was on the effects and implications of very large amounts of money from overseas, not always legally come by, being "invested" in the UK property market in general and the London market in particular. Briefly, masses of houses and flats are bought and even built to lie empty, while ordinary wage-earners cannot afford to buy properties at inflated prices and they often struggle to find a place that is for rent at any price.

It became clear that, perhaps due to foreign  influence on British media proprietors, politicians and global "influence on the influencers", it was quite impossible to have a factual public discussion of those important issues, let alone other ones which the blog author discovered were interconnected. So, instead of trying to smuggle intelligent debate past The Guardian's online moderators, he wrote an exciting and enjoyable crime/espionage adventure novel in which money from communist China is laundered through the UK property market (where British organised crime was already active and constantly gaining power over law-enforcement and even politicians) and where British commercial secrets are stolen by various means, including physical burglaries by Chinese agents at key industrial sites from Scotland to East Anglia.

The novel also shows how much the policies of the Chinese Communist Party are determined by the personalities of the party's General Secretary and his rivals within the CCP leadership. When the leadership is not only corrupt but institutionally psychotic, there can be no change of direction (ie: away from disaster) without a profound reform of that institution as well as a change of leader. Just swapping leaders for another operating within the same corrupt framework will not suffice! 

The implications for Britain of the power over public life that organised crime has obtained by stashing most of its ill-gotten gains in the housing market for generations are just as chilling as the implications for China's future of unending and increasingly corrupt communist dictatorship.

Where to get the novel from:

Amazon.com

Link to Kindle/E-book and Paperback editions

Amazon.co.uk

Link to Kindle/E-book and Paperback editions

Other Amazon marketplaces:

See list of links to Amazon marketplaces on this blog article.
They all offer the Kindle E-book and with the exception of the Netherlands they offer the Paperback as well.

Author's Page on Amazon

Amazon.co.uk:

Follow this link for more stuff on the author.

Amazon.com:
Follow this link for a little bit more stuff on the author, as Amazon.com author's pages have more features!

Smashwords edition

Link to page where the book can be obtained in multiple E-book formats.

Note. This includes a mobi format version. This is formatted a bit differently from the "Kindle" Amazon mobi edition, because the formatting guidelines for the two platforms differ. Mostly, this is a matter of the platform's preferred style, which the author has respected in each case. The Smashwords edition, being available in several formats from the same source document, has in-text navigation features needed for a couple of the non-mobi formats, which are not strictly necessary on devices with Kindle-like navigation facilities and so are not present in the Amazon edition.

In-text navigation in this context amounts to a clickable "Back to Top" link at the end of each chapter or front/back matter section, which takes the reader to the table of contents, from where they can click a link to the chapter or section of their choice. In the Amazon Kindle edition, just press the menu button and go to table of contents for the same result. Hyperlinks are not implemented in the paperback edition, yet, but we may live to see (and probably, regret) this in our lifetimes.

Pricing:

The author has set the base price of the Amazon Paperback to £12.25 plus P&P. Due to the weighty nature of the book the paperback price cannot be much cheaper.  There is no VAT on books (not even E-books!) in the United Kingdom. The base price of the Amazon Kindle Edition is £1.70 There may be a tiny "delivery" charge to distort this figure.

The base price of the Smashwords edition is $2.10.

There is now an Australian-printed Amazon paperback available.

Where to Buy Print Copies of The Author's Books

The Lord of Billionaires' Row

The paperback edition is only available from Amazon. These are links direct to the paperback product page on:

amazon.com

amazon.co.uk

amazon.jp

amazon.ca

The author selected the option for the paperback to be available in every Amazon marketplace where this is possible. Hopefully, the e-books and paperback editions are now linked in all those marketplaces, so looking at the Kindle E-book product page will show you the paperback as well, if it's currently available from that part of the Amazon Empire. See below.

The base price (less P&P) is £12.95 or the local equivalent. There is no VAT on print books in the United Kingdom. Not sure about the EU.

There is now an Australian-printed paperback available. Because of higher printing costs in Australia, this has been locally priced at AUS$24, which works out at AUS$26.40 on the 3rd of June 2021. This price does not include delivery, which may be free to Amazon Prime customers.

E-book editions in various formats are also available from both Amazon and Smashwords.

The Farshoreman

This is now available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B47FLBDS

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B47FLBDS

or search Kindle books in other domains for:

The Farshoreman by Matthew K. Spencer

You will see both the Kindle E-book and Paperback versions if both are available in your Amazon domain, but in some places the paperback is not available for what are apparently environmental reasons.

Where to buy "The Lord of Billionaires' Row"

Smashwords E-book in multiple formats:

Available from this link, base price is $2.10 (library price $1). This edition is available in MOBI, EPUB, PDF and other formats and has in-text navigation features in order to support readers without the menu-driven navigation features of a Kindle.

This edition is also available from most Smashwords affiliates. Search for:

The Lord of Billionaires' Row by Matthew K. Spencer

NB: readers planning to read the book on a Linux PC with Libre Office, for example, will do better to buy the .pdf version rather than the .epub version, because Libre Office may treat every chapter of the .epub as a separate document and send you back to the table of contents to read each one separately. This does not happen with Adobe Digital Editions on a Windows or Mac platform, but in general the .pdf format is recommended for reasonably modern PCs. For geriatric PCs and CPM machines etc. a plaintext .txt version is available.

The online reader version is fine, as long as you can get online when you want to read! If you want something to read during connection outages, choose one of the downloadable files.

 

Amazon MOBI-format E-Book:

This edition does not have the in-text navigation features and is formatted according to Amazon, rather than Smashwords, guidelines. It supports menu-driven navigation as is normal for Kindles. Base price is £1.70, see links or your local Amazon domain for price in your currency and with/without VAT as appropriate to your location.

Available from amazon.co.uk via this link.

                        amazon.com via this link.

                        amazon.co.jp via this link

                        amazon.ca via this link

                        amazon.com.au via this link

                        amazon.in via this link

                        amazon.de via this link

                        amazon.fr via this link

                        amazon.es via this link

                        amazon.it via this link

                        amazon.nl via this link

                        amazon.com.br via this link

                        amazon.com.mx via this link

Amazon Paperback:

Paperback (138,000 words, 375 pages) with a base price of £12.25, plus delivery (which may depend on what else you order). There is no VAT on books in the United Kingdom.

Because the paperback might be purchased by or for readers who cannot cope with a Kindle or other e-reader, the 12-point typeface was chosen for reading comfort and one of the proof copies was read by a 96-year-old who didn't complain, much.

The Kindle E-book and Paperback editions are now linked in all Amazon marketplaces where the Paperback is available, so choose a Kindle E-book link, above, and you should also be able to choose the paperback from the same page. The exception, as of July 2020 seems to be the Netherlands. 

 New: Australian-printed Amazon paperback now available!