Tag: books

The Greatest Living SF Author

Philip K. Dick is dead, alas. As are Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov. (And, apparently, Arthur C. Clarke.) So, who would you nominate for a poll on this subject? Here are my nominees, in no particular order:

Neal Stephenson
China Mieville
John C. Wright

Orson Scott Card looked like a contender early on, but he did his best work first, in my opinion. Good, to be sure, but not great. Charles Stross has declined from his breathtaking Accelerando days; I enjoy his Laundry novels but while they are fun, they are not the stuff from which greatness is made. Lois Bujold is very good, but not on the level of the three men listed above. Once the Fourth of the original Big Three, Arthur C. Clarke is overrated and hasn’t written anything worth reading in years, presumably because he is still dead. William Gibson isn’t so much in the limelight these days, but he continues to write interesting books. Tanith Lee is a fabulous stylist, but she has faded from the Secret Books of Paradys days and she wrote fantasy, not science fiction, anyhow.

Perhaps the New Heinlein, Mr. John Scalzi? A mere jest, in more ways than one. Anyhow, if we can narrow the list to 10, then I will post a poll tomorrow and we can sort out everyone’s opinion on the matter. If you have a potential nominee, please make the case here.

Three possible nominees from three recognizable authors who shall remain nameless unless they wish to identify themselves: Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle. A fourth author seconds the nominations for Niven and Pournelle, and, (rather dubiously in my opinion), throws David Weber’s name into the hat. I say this as one who has recently revisited the Honorverse.

Signed and Limited Edition: Freehold

In honor of the tenth anniversary of its first publication, Mike Z. Williamson and Baen Books are offering a signed hardcover limited edition of Freehold, the first in his Freehold Universe series. It is now available for preorder, so if you are a fan of my mortal enemy and occasional bete noire, M-Zed, this would be the time to act before they run out.

To sign or not to sign

This new petition of Amazon is interesting and relates to some problems to which I’ve pointed before:

Protect Amazon.com Users and Indie Publishing Authors from Bullying and Harassment by Removing Anonymity and Requiring Identity Verification for Reviewing and Forum Participation

For the consideration of Mr. Jeff Bezos and Mr. Jon P. Fine:

The purpose of this petition is to bring to the attention of Mr. Bezos, Mr. Fine, and anyone else employed by Amazon or its subsidiaries, the lack of oversight and or control in the Amazon system regarding product reviewing—in particular book reviewing—and in the participation of the many forums on Amazon.

It is known the world over that Amazon changed the face of self publishing by implementing their Kindle Direct Publishing platform as well as their CreateSpace platform. Anyone can now quickly and easily publish a book using the tools freely provided by Amazon. Whether or not everyone who publishes through KPD and CreateSpace should is not at issue here. What is at issue is the fact that there is an incredible amount of bullying and harassment of some of these self publishing authors taking place on the Amazon platform/system.

I believe, as do countless others—many who will have signed this petition—that the reason this bullying and harassment is able to take place is because of the allowance of anonymity on Amazon. People have found ways to exploit this flaw in the system and are using it to bully, harass, and generally make life miserable for certain authors on Amazon. These people are able to create multiple accounts and then use those accounts to viciously attack and go after any author or person that they feel doesn’t belong on Amazon or who shouldn’t have published a book, made a comment on a forum post, etc. With the current system, if one anonymous account gets deactivated because it was reported for these things, it is easy for the bully or harasser to simply create another anonymous account and continue on with their shenanigans.

What I—we—would like to see happen is for Amazon to revise their policies regarding anonymity when it comes to writing product/book reviews and for participation in the forums. Reviewers and forum participants should not be anonymous. By removing their anonymity and forcing them to display their real, verified identities, I believe that much of the harassment and bullying will cease. It may continue elsewhere on the web, but not on Amazon, the largest online retail marketplace in the world, where it really counts. Buyers of products on Amazon must have their identities verified, so it should be an easy transition to implement a policy whereby reviewers and forum participants must also have their identities verified.

While I could do without the appeals to bullying and so forth, the problem of fake reviews is definitely a real one. And while I am completely opposed to the law mandating real identities, this is simply one private corporation’s policy. So, my inclination is towards signing the petition, but I’m curious to know what the other authors and readers here have to say about it.

I think I’d sign it without question if it was limited to reviews. As much as I dislike restricted forums, I dislike even more the idea that the self-published authors, who are much less accustomed to trolls and socio-sadists working out their psychological issues online than I am, are forced to put up with this sort of nonsense from the very start, especially since they can’t control the forum comments the way I can here. Here it’s no trouble to ban the likes of the usual suspects, or put the short-term kibosh on someone getting out of line, but that’s simply not possible on Amazon.

I think the author of the petition’s assumption that sunlight will deter the trolls is generally correct. I noticed that the number of fake reviews of my books on Amazon declined considerably after I tracked down the woman from Minnesota and posted her address on this blog. Even the Greatest Pensman in All Karatonitus significantly reduced his activities here after I called his place of volunteer work and made it evident that I was in possession of the email addresses of his friends and extended family members. There are few trolls so shameless that they are willing to have those around them know what they are doing and how they are behaving.

UPDATE: Upon reading the discussion and engaging in further reflection, I have decided not to sign the petition. There are more effective ways to deal with the problem and anonymity can be a vital and necessary state for people in certain circumstances.

A prescient parable

I am presently reading John C. Wright’s The Golden Age, and all I can say is that Publisher’s Weekly’s praise of him was neither unmerited nor exaggerated. This part leaped out at me in particular as an unconscious, but apt parable of what we are presently seeing in the world of SF/F:

Back when there was only the White Manorial School and the Black, Hyacinth and I combined forces to create a compromise school, taking the best from both doctrines, the artistic appeal of the Black Mansions and the intellectualism and discipline of the Whites. He provided the inspiration and logic; I provided funds and determination. The mind-swap gave us each the strengths and virtues of the other. Together, we converted the skeptics and conquered a million markets. “But then when the year and a day had passed, we both claimed my property and estates. After all, both of us remembered doing the two hundred years of hard work which had gone into earning it. To settle the quarrel, we both agreed to abide by whatever the Hortators might decide.”

“You had the College of Hortators way back then when you were young?” Helion squinted with impatient humor. “Yes. It was after the invention of fire but before that newfangled wheel contraption. I should tell you about when we domesticated the dog, put a man on the moon, and solved the universal field theorem. Should I continue? I’m trying to make a point.”

“Sorry, sir. Please continue.”

“When the Hortators declared him to be the copy, he refused to accept it. He entered a dreamscape simulation that allowed him to pretend he had won the case. He rewrote his memory, and ordered his sense-filter to edit out any contrary evidence. He continued to live as Helion Prime. He did thought-for-hire and data patterning, and was able to sell his routines out in the real world. He made enough to pay for his dreamspace rental. That worked for a while. But when self-patterning overroutines became standard, his subscriptions ran out, and he was kicked out into the real world.

“But it did not end there. If the Sophotechs had only allowed someone to erase just the sections of his memory when he thought he was me, he would have been his old self, awake, oriented and sane, in a moment or two. But the Sophotechs said it could not be done without his permission. But how could he give his permission? He would not listen to anyone who tried to tell him who he was.

“Instead, he sued me again, and accused me of stealing his life. He lost again. He could not afford enough to hire a Sophotech to give him job-seeking advice, and he could not find other work. The other Hyacinthines, Quintine and Quatrine and Sistine, gave him some charity for a while, but he just spent it again to buy false memories. Eventually, to save on money, he sold his body, and downloaded entirely into a slow-process, low-rent section of the Mentality. Of course, illusions are easier for pure minds to buy, because there is no wire-to-nerve transition.”

“Wouldn’t that also have made it easier for him to find work? Pure minds can go anywhere the mentality network reaches.”
“But he didn’t find new work. He merely created the illusion that he was working. He wrote himself false memories telling himself that he was making enough to live on.”

Helion stared at the ground for a moment, brooding. He spoke softly. “Then he sold his extra lives, one after another. All seven. A Noumenal backup takes up a lot of expensive computer time.

“Then he sold his structure models. He probably figured that he did not need an imitation of a thalamus or hypothalamus any longer, since he had no glands and no dreams, probably did not need a structure to mimic the actions of pain and pleasure centers, parasympathetic reactions, sexual responses, and so on.

“Then, to save space, he began selling memory and intelligence. Every time I came on-line to speak with him, he was stupider; he had forgotten more. But he still kept altering his simulation, making himself forget that either he or anyone else had ever been smarter than the slow-witted brute he was now.”

Phaethon asked, “Father? You still went to see him … ?”

Helion wore as stern a look as Phaethon had ever seen on his face. “Of course. He was my best friend.”

“What happened.? I assume he … Did he die?”

“It dragged on and on. Toward the end, both he and the world he had made were colorless cartoons, flat, jerky, and slow. He had been so brilliant once, so high-hearted and fine. Now he was not able even to concentrate long enough to follow a simple multistructural logic-tree when I tried to reason with him. And I tried.

“But he kept telling himself that I was the one who was hallucinating, me, not him, and the reason why he could not understand me was that his thoughts were on so much higher a plane than mine. And whom else could he ask? All the black-and-white puppets he had made around him nodded and agreed with him; he had forgotten there was an outside world.

“I was there when it happened. He became more and more intermittent, and fell below threshold levels. One moment he was a living soul, closer to me than a brother. The next, he was a recording.

“Even at the end, at the very last moment, he did not know he was about to die. He still thought that he was Helion, healthy, wealthy, well-loved Helion. All the evidences of his sense, all his memories, told him how fortunate and happy his life was. He was not hungry, not in pain. How could he know or guess he was about to die? All our attempts to tell him so were blocked by his sense-filter….”

Helion’s face was gray with grief.

Well, perhaps not so much on the grief part. But the slow and gradual degradation of their fictional worlds to “colorless cartoons, flat, jerky, and slow” could not be more on target if he’d written it for critical purposes.

The Golden Age is excellent. Not good. Not good fun. It is excellent, and perhaps even better, far from predictable.

Raising Steam and the devolution of Pratchett

At his best, Terry Pratchett was much better than he was ever given credit for. His characters were deeply human, his social commentary could border on the brilliant, and if the humor occasionally fell flat at times, well, that was forgivable. That being said, for the sake of his own reputation, he probably should have ended the Discworld series with Making Money.

Raising Steam, the 40th in the Discworld series, isn’t just a predictable spin on the same “new technology comes to Ankh-Morpork” that Pratchett has been increasingly relying upon since Pyramids, it’s Message Fiction. Even worse, it’s Multicultural Message Fiction, which reveals an author woefully out of touch with the nationalist zeitgeist now sweeping Europe.

It’s all very NuLabor and Kumbaya and Surely We Can All Be Friends, which looks hopelessly outdated in George Zimmerman’s America, Lee Rigby’s Britain, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And the speechifying, O sweet Rincewind, the speechifying!

His voice low, Rhys spoke. ‘For what purpose am I King? I will tell you. In a world where we formally recognize trolls, humans and, these days, all manner of species, even goblins, unreconstructed elements of dwarfdom persist in their campaign to keep the grags auditing all that is dwarfish.’
He looked sternly at Ardent as he continued, ‘Dwarfs from every area where dwarfs live in sufficient numbers have tried to modernize, but to no avail apart from those in Ankh-Morpork, and the shame of it is that often those determined to keep dwarfkind in the darkness have somehow inculcated their flocks into believing that change of any sort is a blasphemy, no specific blasphemy, just a blasphemy all by itself, spinning through the cosmos as sour as an ocean of vinegar. This cannot be!’
His voice rose and his fist crashed down on the table. ‘I am here to tell you, my friends and, indeed, my smiling enemies, that if we do not band together against the forces that wish to keep us in darkness dwarfkind will be diminished. We need to work together, talk to one another, deal properly with one another and not spend all our time in one enormous grump that the world isn’t entirely ours any more and, at the finish, ruin it for everyone. After all, who would deal with such as us in a world of new choices? In truth, we should act as sapient creatures should! If we don’t move with the future, the future will twist and roll right over us.’
Rhys paused to accommodate the inevitable outburst of Shame! and Not so! and all the other detritus of rotted debate, and then spoke again. ‘Yes, I recognize you, Albrecht Albrechtson. The floor is yours.’
The elderly dwarf, who had once been favourite to win the last election for Low King, said courteously, ‘Your majesty, you know I have no particular liking for the way that the world is going, nor some of your more modern ideas, but I have been shocked to discover that some of the more headstrong grags are still orchestrating attacks on the clacks system.’
The King said, ‘Are they mad?! We made it clear to this council and all dwarfs, after the message we received from Ankh-Morpork about their clacks being attacked, that this stupidity must cease at once. It’s even worse than the Nugganites, who were, to be sensible about this, totally and absolutely bloody insane.’
Albrecht coughed and said, ‘Your majesty, in this instance I find myself standing shoulder to shoulder with you. I am appalled to see things go this far. What are we but creatures of communication and communication accurately communicated is a benison to be cherished by all species everywhere. I never thought I would say this, but the news I am hearing lately, and am expected to delight in, makes me ashamed to call myself a dwarf. We have our differences and it’s right and proper that we should have them, and discourse and compromise are cornerstones in the proper world of politics, but here and now, your majesty, you have my full and unequivocal support. And as for those who stand in our way, I call down a murrain on them. I say, a murrain!’
There are uproars and there are uproars and this uproar stayed up for a very long time.
Eventually Albrecht Albrechtson brought his axe down on to the table, splitting the wood from top to bottom, bringing terrified silence across the gathered dwarfs, and said, ‘I support my King. That is what a King is for. A murrain, I said. A murrain. And a Ginnungagap for those that say different.’

Then, three pages later, Lord Vetinari contemplates those irritating little unthinking people who stand in the way of Progress.

Curious, the Patrician thought, as Drumknott hurried away to dispatch a clacks to the editor of the Times, that people in Ankh-Morpork professed not to like change while at the same time fixating on every new entertainment and diversion that came their way. There was nothing the mob liked better than novelty. Lord Vetinari sighed again. Did they actually think? These days everybody used the clacks, even little old ladies who used it to send him clacks messages complaining about all these new-fangled ideas, totally missing the irony….
There was nothing for it but to follow the wave. New things, new ideas arrived and strutted their stuff and were vilified by some and then lo! that which had been a monster was suddenly totally important to the world. All the time the fanglers and artificers were coming up with even more useful things that hadn’t been foreseen and suddenly became essential. And the pillars of the world remained unshaken.

Pratchett completely fails to see the irony in his presentation of a King and a Dictator as the voices of Inevitable Progress. This scene gives way, on literally the next page, to a dwarf waxing eloquent on how wonderful it is that dwarves and trolls are friends now, and twenty pages later, is followed by a FOURTH repetition of THE SAME VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE.

Bleddyn had cooked a good rat supper and was upset when she saw his face and said, ‘Those damn grags again! Why don’t you tell them to put their nonsense where the light shines too much!’fn26
Bleddyn didn’t usually swear, so that surprised him, and she continued, ‘They had a point once. They said that we were being swallowed up by the humans and the trolls, and you know it’s true, except that it’s the wrong kind of truth. The kids’ve got human friends and one or two trolls as well and nobody notices, nobody thinks about it. Everyone is just people.’
He looked at her face and said, ‘But we’re diminished, less important!’
But Bleddyn was emphatic and said, ‘You silly old dwarf. Don’t you think the trolls consider themselves diminished too? People mingle and mingling is good! You’re a dwarf, with big dwarf hobnail boots and everything else it takes to be a dwarf. And remember, it wasn’t so long ago that dwarfs were very scarce outside of Uberwald. You must know your history? Nobody can take that away, and who knows, maybe some trolls are saying right now, “Oh dear, my little pebbles is being influenced by the dwarfs! It’s a sin!” The Turtle moves for everybody all the time, and those grags schism so often that they consider everyone is a schism out there on their own. Look it up. I’ve cooked you a lovely rat – nice and tender – so why not eat it up and get out into the sunshine? I know it isn’t dwarfish, but it’s good for getting your clothes dried.’
When he laughed she smiled and said, ‘All that’s wrong in the world is that it’s spilling over us as if we’re stones in a stream, and it’ll leave us eventually. Remember your old granddad telling you about going to fight the trolls in Koom Valley, yes? And then you told your son how you went back to Koom Valley and found out the whole damn business was a misunderstanding. And because of all this, our Brynmor won’t even have to fight unless someone is extremely stupid. Say no to the grags. Really, they’re bogeymen. I’ve spoken to all the women round here and they say exactly the same thing. 

It’s one tedious lecture after another and the sheer idiocy of the message is remarkable. The idea that war is based on misunderstanding, that people are all the same underneath, and that multiculturalism and multiethnic societies means our children won’t have to fight is not only wrong, it is downright backward. It is this very thinking that has guaranteed that the wars of the next generation will be more vicious, more bitter, and more terrible, on a larger scale, than anything Europe has seen since the Thirty Years War.

The nations did not come to exist in a vaccuum. Nations are born from two things, geographic isolation and the hellish cauldron of inter-group exile and extermination. Just as Hutus and Tutsis didn’t care that they were both called “Rwandans” when they murdered each other, no one is going to care that they are “British” or “French” or “American” when the debt-inflated pseudo-wealth is gone and the struggle for real resources begins.

Raising Steam isn’t a capstone on a distinguished career, it is a badly written caricature that is a tombstone for a dying idea.

Big Boys Don’t Cry by Tom Kratman

Castalia House today announced BIG BOYS DON’T CRY. Now available from Amazon, it is a novella from military science fiction author Tom Kratman, known for
A Desert Called Peace and the Carrera series. The novella follows the
life cycle of a Ratha, a sentient future supertank that dutifully fights
Man’s battles on dozens of alien worlds. But will the massive creature
still be grateful to its creators when it discovers it has a conscience?
And how long will an intelligent war machine with enough firepower to
flatten a city be content to remain Man’s obedient slave?

I asked Tom for his thoughts on the publication of BIG BOYS DON’T CRY:

“Not many people think of it this way, but the Boloverse, as in the late Keith Laumer’s Bolos and the spin-offs, is one of the most liberal themes in science fiction.  It’s especially funny precisely because almost nobody understands that it’s liberal.  Why do I say it’s liberal?  Because it’s all about the easy, certain, and reliable programming of altruistic values in sentient beings.  Brother, sister, that’s the penultimate CORE of liberalism.  Interestingly, since the stories can move even me, it suggests to me that we ALL have some liberal in us.

“Big Boys Don’t Cry isn’t a Bolo story, either in the special military technical details or in the theme.  What it is, though, is a deconstruction of that liberal meme on the easy, certain, and reliable programming of altruism in sentient beings.

“It’s also, I think, a pretty good story.”

From the early Amazon reviews:

“Colonel Kratman, the evil, cruel, soulless, right-wing, misogynistic, war
mongering, homophobe has gone and written a tale of loss and betrayal
and honor and redemption that broke my heart….”

“This is my first time reading Kratman. His reputation suggested he was
someone who could weave clever and hard-hitting military sci-fi prose
and this novella is a testament to that.”

“I can gladly recommend it to all lovers of military science fiction.”

“This is one of the darker SF books I have ever read.”

“This book is brutal and moving and worth every penny spent, every minute reading it.”

You can’t stop the signal

But you can delay it. Should have done this yesterday, but better late than never. Amping Larry Correia’s current Book Bomb, Chuck Dixon’s Bad Time series:

Four men. Four Days. For the fight of their lives. It was just a walk
in the desert to a place 100, 000 years in the past. They thought they
knew what to expect but they were wrong. Now a team of scientists is
trapped in a world they were not prepared for and can never return from.
Their only hope lies in quartet of former US Army Rangers willing to
travel to prehistoric Nevada and face unknown horrors and impossible
odds bring them home from Bad Times.

Book 1: Cannibal Gold
Book 2: Blood Red Tide

Is it just me or do those titles have a distinct Glen Cookian sound to them. Chuck Dixon is a comic writer and the creator of Nightwing and Bane; he has now moved into writing novels. Not being a graphic novel guy, this the first I’ve heard of him myself, so I’d welcome any comments from those who have read his books.

Question of the Day: can the books be legitimately classified in the “Space Marine” category when the gentlemen involved are snake eaters?

UPDATE: Take that, Larry! Cannibal Gold had fallen back to #2,123 when this posted. Now it’s up to #1,156. It would be amusing to see it top the #911 that Larry’s readers managed.

New books, new policies

Castalia House has already announced that Tom Kratman’s Big Boys Don’t Cry will be published at the end of this month. In addition to that, we will have another book coming out as well. We aren’t ready to announce it yet, but I will say that it is longer than a novella and the first two words in the title begin with the letters Q and M. So, I’m looking for 20 volunteers, ten for each book, to commit to reading the books and then reviewing them when they go live on Amazon. Please send me an email with either BBDC or QM in the title. And if you aren’t already familiar with the science fiction world of Quantum Mortis, you’ve got a few weeks to read QM: Gravity Kills and QM: A Man Disrupted before the third volume appears.

And in other news, we certainly have not forgotten about Selenoth. If you haven’t already read Summa Elvetica, this is your chance to get caught up since Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy is free for the first time on Amazon today.

Castalia House has also reviewed its translations policy after speaking to our vast stable of authors as well as consulting with a number of professional translators. We have decided that our standard offering will be a 25 percent royalty to translators and 25 percent royalty to the authors on revenues from the translated editions. This approach appears to be satisfactory for all three parties concerned, as Castalia House now has 20 foreign language translations in progress.

Also, if you’re one of the reviewers of QM:AMD or QM:GK, please note that the missing reviews may have been preserved in your Amazon account even though they’re not appearing on the book’s current page. So, if you don’t mind, please check to see if you still have it and post it to the current book page.

Of Amazon and author earnings

You may recall that last year, I pointed out that John Scalzi was not only doing authors a serious disservice by denigrating self-publishing, attacking publishers who mitigate their risk by not paying advances, and throwing a public hissy fit over Random House moving into the 21st Century with its Hydra imprint, he was actually doing himself a disservice by throwing away more than half his revenues for the privilege of being able to say he is approved by the gatekeepers at Tor. Scalzi, of course, pretended that I had no idea what I was talking about, because he is a special snowflake who has a totally unique publishing contract that bears no similarity to any other publishing deal in the industry or something like that.

After all, who are you going to trust on such matters, the economics writer who correctly predicted both the bull market in gold and the 2008 financial crisis or the Bernie Madoff of science fiction with his “50,000 DAILY READERS”?

I mention this because Hugh Howey, the massively successful SF self-publisher, just released a fascinating report on the current economics of publishing and what he learned pretty much confirmed everything that I’ve been saying on the subject for the last two years. It also very clearly demonstrates that the current and past leadership of the SFWA consist of individuals who did not, and who do not, understand the electronic train coming down the tracks that is already in the process of crushing the traditional publishers.

Here is what our data guru found when he used sales per ranking data and applied it to the top 7,000 bestselling genre works on Amazon today: Looks good for the Big Five, doesn’t it? When it comes to gross dollar sales, they take half the pie. Remember, they only account for a little over a quarter of the unit sales. Also keep in mind that they only have to pay 25% of net revenue to the author. By contrast, self-published authors on Amazon’s platform keep 70% of the total purchase price.

 Let’s now look at revenue from the author’s perspective: It’s a complete inversion. Indie authors are earning nearly half the total author revenue from genre fiction sales on Amazon. Nearly half. This next chart reveals why: Blue represents the author. You can clearly see that for Big-Five published works, the publisher makes more than twice what the author makes for the sale of an e-book. Keep in mind that the profit margins for publishers are better on e-books than they are on hardbacks. That means the author gets a smaller cut while the publisher takes a larger share. This, despite the fact that e-books do not require printing, warehousing, or shipping. As a result, self-published authors as a group are making 50% more profit than their traditionally published counterparts, even though their books have only half the gross sales revenue.

But here is the money bit:

You may have heard from other reports that e-books account for roughly 25% of overall book sales. But this figure is based only on sales reported by major publishers. E-book distributors like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the iBookstore, and Google Play don’t reveal their sales data. That means that self-published e-books are not counted in that 25%. Neither are small presses, e-only presses, or Amazon’s publishing imprints. This would be like the Cookie Council seeking a report on global cookie sales and polling a handful of Girl Scout troops for the answer—then announcing that 25% of worldwide cookie sales are Thin Mints. But this is wrong. They’re just looking at Girl Scout cookies, and even then only a handful of troops.

In other words, any statistics you read concerning the publishing industry are even less credible than the fiction produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That being said, I believe Howey is right. I believe “the world of literature has its brightest days still ahead” and part of that is going to be the result of the destruction of the gatekeepers who have been methodically destroying science fiction and fantasy for the last 30 years. The gatekeepers cannot sustain their inflated prices, they cannot foist their favored authors on unsuspecting readers, and they can no longer pretend their books sell any better or are of any higher quality than those being produced by the myriad of other active publishers for much longer.

“It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the
overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the
dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100
best-selling books in these genres are e-books!”

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. In 13 months, ebooks have comprised 94 percent of the sales of A Throne of Bones. And keep in mind that Howey’s statistics probably don’t include the distribution of free ebooks. My free/sold ratio is 5/1. This is why Castalia House is only producing print books in hardcover for the hard-core fans who enjoy collecting as well as reading; if it’s not electronic, it’s no longer really relevant.

I should mention that another serious problem for the traditional publishers I predicted during my campaign for SFWA president has already surfaced, and it has done so even sooner than I said it would. Dreamworks Interactive recently announced that it will no longer be licensing the publishing rights to its works, but will publish its own ebooks. This means that the very lucrative media tie-in model that is keeping many of the larger genre publishers afloat is about to disappear. That means no more paying sizable advances to award-winning authors of terrible romances in space on the basis of Halo tie-in sales. It will be interesting to see which of the major genre publishers goes down first.

Forthcoming

I have not forgotten that I said there would be fewer Castalia House announcements here and more over there, but this one is simply too big to resist sharing with the Dread Ilk. Castalia House is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of a Tom Kratman novella entitled Big Boys Don’t Cry, which is scheduled for release on 1 March 2014 and will be available in Kindle and epub format for $2.99.

If you are a Kratman fan and a native speaker of a non-English language, we will be very interested to hear from you and talk to you about translating Mr. Kratman’s work and thereby terrorizing the non-English speaking peoples of the Earth as well. I expect you will understand that the novella contains the occasional difference of opinion, settled, as one might anticipate, in the most civilized and peaceable of manners.