Tag: books

Attn ebook authors

If you are looking for a cover artist for your ebook, I highly recommend you get in touch with JartStar.  In addition to doing the covers for A Magic Broken, The Wardog’s Coin, and The Last Witchking, he recently produced the cover for Mr. Pritt’s forthcoming ebook, The Online Ramblings of a Foolish Sage, which can be seen to the left.

If you’re interested in checking out JartStar’s work, visit his online gallery.  I can testify that he puts in an incredible effort to make sure that the cover is one that is in line with the contents of the book, looks good at both full-size and Amazon resolutions, and is entirely satisfactory to the author.  At $250 per original cover, they are a real bargain, and as a member of the Dread Ilk, JartStar will give a discount to any fellow Ilk who happen to be publishing ebooks.

SFWA 3.0’s target market

It’s truly not fair to say that there is no market for the necro-bestial love triangles and transgendered Regency romances of color in space so beloved of the new SFWA.  The market definitely exists, as evidenced here:

it’s funny tho when ppl give u shit for not reading or wanting to get
into “classic novels” like im sorry why do i wanna read about the
ramblings of some crusty old white dude who doesn’t even know what 
clitoris is when i can read about time traveling interracial lesbian
romances in space

As to whether that is a market that merits pursuing to the exclusion of works in the mode of crusty old white dudes such as Asimov, Card, Heinlein, Herbert, Tolkien, Lewis, and Verne is a question I quite happily leave to fine SF/F publishers such as Tor Books, Night Shade Books and Golden Gryphon Press.

CS award finalists

Speculative Faith announces the finalists for the 2013 Clive Staples Award:

We have finalists. In a tight race, with only percentage points separating first through ninth place (yes, we did need to revert to the tie-breaker second- and third-place choices), the top five books are moving on to the finals….

And now, your finalists, in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name:

Liberator by Bryan Davis
A Throne of Bones by Vox Day
Mortal by Ted Dekker and Tosca Lee
Prophet by R. J. Larson
Starflower by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

But now, on to the important business at hand. It is time to vote for a winner. Please follow these rules.

* You MUST have read at least two of the nominations.
* You may vote ONLY ONCE for a first, a second, and a third choice.
* Your second choice and your third choice may not be the same as your first choice.
* Your vote for your second choice and your third choice may not be for the same book.
* You may mark the “none of these” option if you do not have a second or a third choice.
* Second and third choice options will only be considered in the case of a tie.

* Voting ends midnight Pacific time, July 28, 2013.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE

CLICK HERE TO VOTEIt is, of course, an honor to be nominated.  Frankly, considering the brouhaha that surrounded the establishment of Hinterlands, I’m astonished that the book is even eligible.

SE+ now on Amazon

CA writes to inform us that the hardcover for Summa Elvetica and Other Stories is now available from Amazon:

I wrote up a review on SE+ at Amazon (the first associated with the hardcover). It should be posted within 48 hours of my submission. While it isn’t as flowing as your prose, I just wanted you to know that your writing is just flat out awesome. My first exposure to your writing was ATOB and then I recently just finished SE+. Now I am anxiously awaiting Arts of Dark and Light Book 2….

So many cultures, points of view.. and they all feel real. I am just floored by each character I read. None seems out of place. Each culture fits. Each character acts realistically. I loved how you even showed the POV of characters like Speer and Bextor and …ugh I can’t remember the Chui’s name….but the “enemy” cultures. I think that made your world feel all the more real. Anyway, thanks for the wonderful escapes into the world of Selenoth.

This is intended mostly for the serious fans of Selenoth who want the hardcover, as there is nothing in it that isn’t contained in the four ebooks: Summa Elvetica, A Magic Broken, The Wardog’s Coin, and The Last Witchking.  The general consensus is that the hardcover is pretty and makes a suitable companion for A Throne of Bones until such time that Book Two is available.

I’m pleased that many of you are eagerly anticipating Book Two, but it’s going to take a while.  In the meantime, for those of you who haven’t read through what is available to date, there are now 1,436 pages of Selenoth to keep you occupied.

Apple found guilty of ebook price-fixing

Now this is going to cause some SERIOUS tremors throughout the publishing world.

The tech giant’s defeat in a New York court is likely to cost the iPad and
iPhone maker hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The technology giant battled the US Department of Justice in the landmark
case, heard last month in Manhattan, over whether a policy of allowing
publishers to set the price of ebooks broke America’s anti-trust laws.

On Wednesday District Judge Denise Cote, who oversaw the trial, said that
Apple was the ringleader in a conspiracy, which forced the price of ebooks
upwards from the $9.99 Amazon had set as standard to $12.99 and in some
cases $14.99.

“The plaintiffs have shown that the publisher defendants conspired with
each other to eliminate retail price competition in order to raise e-book
prices, and that Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing
that conspiracy,” Judge Cote said. “Without Apple’s orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have
succeeded as it did in the spring of 2010,” she added.

The good news is that ebook prices should continue to fall to more economically sensible levels.  And the power of the gatekeepers is going to continue to dwindle as their revenues and profit margins continue to fall in response to the greater competition they are facing from independent publishers and self-publishers.

Another interesting thing is that for contractual reasons I am not at liberty to divulge, the major publishers will not be able to sell books through the in-game retail channel.  This will provide even more incentive for the big game developers to retain their media tie-in rights rather than continuing to license them to publishers unable to sell the books through their games.

A belated review

Tom Simon belatedly writes a ruthless review of The Sword of Shannara only 30 years late:

I steered grimly clear of it, having a pretty clear idea what I would be letting myself in for if I read it, and in any case I could not afford to spend money on a cheap imitation of a book already occupying a place of honour in my library. But a friend gave me a dogeared copy of Sword (as I shall call it for short) for nothing, knowing that I wanted to write something about the fantasy boom of 1977, and a week or two ago I finally plodded through all 726 mind-numbing and turgid pages.

It is not, as it happens, the worst book I have ever read, or even the worst genre novel. That distinction belongs either to one of John Norman’s Gor books (I have read only one, and I think it was the first one, but the title has mercifully faded from my memory) or a trivial bit of naughty-naughty in science-fiction drag by one Jarrod Comstock. I have, as it happens, a book worse than either of these: Saga of Old City, by Gary Gygax. This is in fact the most cringingly awful waste of wood pulp I have ever seen offered under the rubric of fiction, but I cannot truthfully claim to have read it. It begins:

    The big, blackish rat sat upon the feast as a king upon his throne. Gord eyed the scene hungrily, his mouth watering at the sight of the trencher. Some incredibly wasteful person had discarded a slab of bread, soaked in rich meat juices and imbedded with succulent bits of things. It lay atop the garbage heap in the alleyway, and the rat sat peremptorily upon it. Gord stood nearby in jittery indecision — encouraged by hunger, restrained by fear. Then he decided to act. With a rapid motion he scooped up a pebble and flung it at the rodent. It struck the rat on its flank, but the creature didn’t run off as Gord had hoped. Instead, the rat bared its teeth viciously, voiced a horrid chittering noise, and advanced menacingly in Gord’s direction. With a frightened shriek, Gord leapt back, turned, and fled. Such a threat easily overcame the gnawing feeling in his stomach.

    ‘Shiteater!’ Gord screamed over his shoulder as he fled the huge rodent.

At this point I flung the book across the room. I don’t know how I acquired it; I think it was abandoned by its former owner; and the back cover is battered and torn in a way that suggests it had been thrown against walls before. I am tempted to compare it to the infamous Eye of Argon, but I find that the case will not lie. Gygax’s monstrosity has been at least superficially edited, robbing it of the obvious errors and typographic howlers that furnish Argon with at least half its charm. There are no lithe, opaque noses or scarlet emeralds in Gygax, though in fairness there is a city called Stoink. Jim Theis had to publish his story in an apazine; Gygax, as the owner of TSR, could force his employees to publish Saga of Old City and even had the clout to get it commercially distributed. I think it safe to say that neither work would ever have been accepted by an editor who was free to reject it.

The Sword of Shannara is not as bad as that. This is what is known as damning with faint praise.

But that does not mean, Mr. Shippey to the contrary, that there is any difficulty in identifying it as a bad book. It is of course a close copy of The Lord of the Rings, in the sense that a paint-by-numbers Mona Lisa is a close copy of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Each artless blob of colour recognizably stands for an element superbly executed in the original. But it is also haunted by the ghost of quite a different sort of book, and it took me some time to work out just what it was. Leaving aside the stolen plot, what Sword really reminds me of is Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, as seen through the jaundiced eye of Mark Twain.

Read the whole thing.  It mercilessly dissects what I always remembered as a shameless ripoff of Tolkien, but I never realized precisely how incompetent it was.   And Simon pinpoints the utter absurdity of the basic plot in the first place.

A still more blatant stupidity is the inclusion of Shea Ohmsford in the
company sent to retrieve the Sword in the first place. We are told that
the Sword has the power to destroy the Warlock Lord, and that only Shea
can use it. Every other person who could possibly wield it has been
systematically hunted down and killed, and the Skull Bearers (=Nazgûl)
have already tried to kill Shea once. A sane person would lock Shea up
in the remotest and most impenetrable fortress in the country, with an
army ringed round to protect him, rather than let him go anywhere near
the forces of the Warlock Lord. Instead he is sent along as one of the
eight companions on the quest to recover the Sword from Paranor. Shea
has no magic to speak of, no skill with weapons, no ability as an
outdoorsman, nothing that would make him even remotely useful to such an
expedition. Anybody can handle the Sword; anybody could go and
fetch it and bring it back to him; but no, he must go along himself,
exposing the quest to certain ruin and the whole world to defeat and
devastation if he is captured.

The Sword of Shannara did have one thing going for it, however.  Being a shameless ripoff of Tolkien, it was semi-readable, which is more than one can say for the subsequent books in the series.  I tried three times to read the next book, and never managed to make it as far as chapter three.

Fictitious profit

Some SFWAns around the Internet have been pointing to this profit calculation to “prove” that rapacious publishers are ripping them off by more than doubling their hardcover royalties on ebooks.  As one has learned to expect from the fun bunch, they have no absolutely idea what they’re doing.

Look at Harper’s own numbers:

$27.99 hardcover generates $5.67 profit to publisher and $4.20 royalty to author
$14.99 agency priced e-book generates $7.87 profit to publisher and $2.62 royalty to author.

So, in other words, at these average price points, every time a
hardcover sale is replaced by an e-book sale, the publisher makes $2.20
more per copy and the author makes $1.58 less. If the author made the
same $4.20 royalty on the e-book sale as he/she would have on a
hardcover, the publisher would STILL be making an improved profit of
$6.28.

Now, I have less use for mainstream publishers than just about anyone who publishes books these days, but this calculation is completely misleading for the obvious reason that it is using the wrong price from which to calculate the profit.  As per DBW:


“After months of consistent declines to a low near $6.00, they’re on the rise again. This week, the average price of an ebook best-seller is $9.48, up slightly from last week, which was the first time the price was north of $9.00 in all of 2013.”

Since the average price of an ebook is more like $8.00 on average, this means that if we plug it into the Harper model, the ebook generates $4.50 profit to the publisher and $1.50 to the author.  And it has gone as low as $3.15, although we can safely disregard this lower figure because it was unduly influenced by low-priced, self-published bestsellers. Regardless, both figures, you will note, are less than the $5.67 in gross profit minus author’s royalty generated by the hardcover sale.

This inability to grasp the basic facts of the rapidly changing market for books is why the SF/F writers are going to be taken completely by surprise when more publishers “unexpectedly” go the way of Night Shade.  These authors think ebooks have made their publishers nearly 40 percent more profitable, all at the expense of the royalties paid to them, when the reality is that despite the ebook’s much lower cost of production, (which, keep in mind, has no impact on the publisher’s overhead), the publishers are actually running somewhere between 20 percent and 45 percent LESS profitable on a per-unit-sold basis alone.

If the publishers were to do as the post’s author suggests and pay the same $4.20 royalty on the ebook that they presently do on the hardcover, they’d make a profit margin of 7.1 percent instead of 42.6 percent.  That would barely pay their rent and utility bills, never mind their payroll.  Note that historically, commercial publishers have run at 40 percent profit margins; even the powerful academic publisher, Elsevier, has seen its operating profit margins slip to 36 percent.  SF/F genre publishers aren’t doing anywhere nearly so well.

Falling retail prices and shrinking profit margins are why the publishers have been cutting their midlist authors and offering fewer, smaller contracts.  They simply can’t afford to publish moderately successful authors anymore, and if average ebook prices fall to $4, as I expect them to within the next 2-3 years, they will not be able to afford publishing anyone who hasn’t already proven to be a reliable bestseller… usually through self-publishing.

A different kind of awesome

It may strike some as ironic, but I have to confess, I very much enjoy reading through the book reviews/rants by the rabid lady reviewer known as Requires Only That You Hate. The fascinating thing is that despite her ability to detect misogyny in a gust of wind and racism in a blade of grass, she’s actually less inclined to give the mediocre writers of the SF/F field a pass on the basis of their sex and color than most readers and reviewers are. 

Consider her review of one ignorant half-savage’s ludicrously overpraised work, the condescending plaudits for which are more intrinsically racist than most historical KKK pamphlets.

As I speed-read through The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I couldn’t get rid of the nagging suspicion that I’ve read this before. At first I thought Laurell K. Hamilton, because some of the sex descriptions are very silly, but that’s not it. Then I thought that the obligatory dark-haired bishounen Nahadoth shares several qualities with a certain breed of demon lovers from trashy paranormal romances or possibly Edward Cullen.

It wasn’t until I read a review that gushes something along the line of “fans of Anne Bishop’s Daemon won’t be able to help being just a bit in love with Nahadoth” that it finally clicked: this is the Black Jewels trilogy sans the giant Mary Sue, horrible writing, and creepy pedophilia….

Jemisin is much like Bishop in that she doesn’t give a shit about her
setting or, if she does, lacks the life to breathe into it. You might
wonder: what does the world/country/land look like? No clue, beyond that
Sky is white and pearly. What’s their technology level? Who knows (the
author answered this in an interview, but if you can’t tell by reading
the book alone, well then). The setting’s a cardboard backdrop
that might fall over and crumble any minute. One of the novel’s selling
points is that it supposedly veers from a typical medieval European
culture and the protagonist is dark-skinned, but frankly, you can’t
tell. When I said Borgias on steroids, I meant it: the Arameri is one
big lump of implied incest, sadism, corruption, and loads of other
things that would have impressed the Lannisters except every single one
of them–except for Yeine’s mother–is a blithering idiot. They behave in
exactly the way you would expect from my description. Their customs are
as generic fantasy as they come….

Easily the most overrated thing ever to come out recently, and I’m going
to assume that people who gush over how groundbreaking it all is have
only ever read Tolkien and Eragon.

I think this may be the woman against whom R. Scott Bakker was so desperate to set me when he was being hit from both sides for his unseemly fascination with raping every female character that so much as twitched in his novels.  Regardless, aside from her ideologically driven preferences, RH has reasonably good taste in SF/F, as she thinks well of Tanith Lee, Joan D. Vinge, and China Mieville, while turning up her nose at overrated mediocrities like Jemisin, Sheri Tepper, Jasper Fforde, and Saladin Ahmed. 

She’s a bit harsh on Jim Butcher, but for some of the right reasons as she correctly identifies the psychosexual development of his characters as being stuck at the teenage level and Harry Dresden being an idealized stand-in for his gamma male creator.  She accurately nails Joe Abercrombie for writing primarily for effect. And she’s uncommonly observant with regards to Neil Gaiman, whose fans will likely never be able to regard his work in quite the same way after reading her adroit demonstration of how Gaiman keeps writing the same book over and over and over again.

After a certain point it’s no longer fun and you ram up against the realization that they are all the same fucking story.

Oh sure, the characters have different names. They have different tones–Stardust is, I think, meant to be young adult. But observe this:

  • gutless, spineless everyman-loser protagonist with limited personality, intelligence, and no charm: hereafter known as Mr. Cliched Stock Type
  • the woman who henpecks Mr. Cliched Stock Type
  • Mr. Cliched Stock Type discovers a hidden magical world
  • Mr. Cliched Stock Type discovers a special destiny, either prophesied, part of his secret magic heritage, or both
  • Mr. Cliched Stock Type fulfills special destiny

Now you’re going to go BUT HERO’S JOURNEY JOHN CAMPBELL and I’m going to go SHUT THE FUCK UP. Setting aside for a moment that I’m willing to punch anybody who cites Campbell’s “monomyth” as an excuse for shitty writing, lack of imagination, and all around inability to write–setting aside that, it’s not only the similarity in structure. It’s that Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods and Anansi Boys are written by the exact same man. It’s that Mr. Stock Type shows up for all four, each iteration as dull and insufferable as the last, distinguishable only faintly by his name.

Leaving American Gods and Stardust alone for now, this isn’t so much a matter of “oh you could do this to any fantasy book,” itself an asinine proposition, because not all fantasy books feature a timid Londoner devoid of ambition who has relationship troubles with a demanding sweetheart/fiancee. The sweethearts in question(respectively Rosie Noah, Jessica, and Victoria Forrester) are likewise identical: thinly written, demanding, henpecking, and not the brightest. Really Gaiman kind of sucks at writing women, and apart from this one incredibly tertiary character in American Gods I don’t think he’s particularly comfortable with gay men–certainly not enough to write them as protagonists. Similarly, the catalyst to “finding the secret magic world” is always more or less the same: through colliding with one of said secret world’s inhabitants.

It does tend to raise certain questions about Mr. Gaiman’s past relationships, does it not? And although she doesn’t quite grasp the point of Mieville’s excellent Embassytown, (nor is she able to grok either his Kraken, or City and the City), she does at least recognize that it is an unusual and highly intelligent work.

Given her pure and burning hatred for all things civilizational, I suspect it would be more than a little hilarious if she were to review A Throne of Bones.  RH, if you happen to read this, I should be absolutely delighted to send you an ebook and discover what panoply of horrors you are capable of discerning there.