Monthly Archives: February 2010
My February blog tour guest: Hamish MacDonald
| February 14, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Blog Tour |
This month for the blog tour, I’m hosting Hamish MacDonald, a fellow member of the Outer Alliance. Many people turn up their noses at the concept of self-publishing, but Hamish avoids all of the usual issues with that–he not only writes his own books, he designs, prints, hand-binds, and sells them, too. He is, in short, a true self-published author.
If you’d like to read the rest of the blog tour posts for this round, point your browsers right here.
And without further ado, here’s Hamish! I’ve put in a More link where he mentions a spoiler warning for the ending of his book, but you can get most of his post without it. Enjoy, all!
The Boomerang of Revelation
My best experience with a work in progress isn’t a particular event, but a kind of experience. It happens at some point with every book, but I first became aware of it when writing my second novel, The Willies.
I’m a huge fan of outlining. Before I start a novel, I plot out the whole arc of the story. It’s like taking a map on vacation: You can still wander all you like, but you won’t get lost or fall off a cliff. Some people start at Page One and that works for them — most notably Stephen King, as he claimed in his book, On Writing — but I find I can let go more when I can trust that I know where I’m going. Having a map of Paris is completely different to walking through its streets, so I don’t think it spoils the fun at all; in fact, it makes sure you don’t miss the best sights.
Isn’t outlining everything in advance like opening your Christmas presents early? No, because unlike a Christmas present, the stakes with a story are different: There might be a dead chicken in the box, and it’s best to know that before you’ve committed a year or two to the project.
That said, there’s always a point with every book when I discover some piece of the map is blank: I thought I’d filled that in, but something here doesn’t connect. With The Willies, that happened at the end, and the whole story fell into a pothole in the road. How does it end?
The Willies is a science fiction/thriller/comedy story about two friends who discover they’re clones. The lead character, Hugh, has a perfect memory: everything he’s ever seen and heard is stored up in his head. He and his childhood best friend, Simon, were products of an experiment and were never meant to be born, and now someone wants them dead. So by the end, they’ve been on the run for about 250 pages, wrestling as they go with the difficult friendship they’ve had. But how would it resolve?
(Spoiler warning: I’m going to talk about the ending here, in case you might consider reading the book.)
Nominations are now OPEN
| February 2, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood |
Ladies and gentlemen, now is the time for you to submit your nominations for the following vital question:
“What should Anna name her Nook?”
I shall accept nominations for the next two weeks, so you have until February 16th to submit your suggestions! On that day I shall open an official poll for voting, and the winner of same will receive one of the following, their choice:
- A $25 gift certificate to the Drollerie Press bookstore
- Free copies of both Faerie Blood and Defiance
- A free print copy of the Drollerie book of their choice
So let’s hear your suggestions, folks! For convenience’s sake, if you’re reading this post on LJ, Dreamwidth, or anywhere else, do please click through to angelakorrati.com and drop your comments on the original post. Thanks and I look forward to hearing your suggestions!
ETA: LJ, Dreamwidth, or otherwise LJ-like site users, please do click through to the original angelakorrati.com post to leave comments with your nominations! I really do need all the votes in one place so as to better keep track of them all, and to also accommodate non-LJ users. Thanks all!
Never mind Amazon vs. Macmillan, let's talk authors!
| February 2, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood, Publishing |
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So the whole Amazon vs. Macmillan fracas has accomplished three things for me, as of last night:
One, I have bought a nook. The cost of said nook as well as a loverly cover to put it in is roughly about the same as the amount of royalties I have now received for Faerie Blood, and to a tiny degree, Defiance.
(Which of course means that this is the Nook That Faerie Blood Bought, folks. That you all helped me buy. And for this, I thank you all! Watch this space for a forthcoming new poll on what exactly I should name the Nook, and a likely giveaway for a randomly selected winner!)
Two, I’ve also bought five, count ‘em, five ebooks by Macmillan authors, up on Fictionwise.
Three, and because I’m really in the mood to show some love directly to awesome authors, I have thrown ten bucks at the current efforts of to sell her commissioned novella “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”. It’s set in her Old Races universe and features Janx and Daisani, and she’s selling it directly off her site for ten bucks a pop this month. Hie ye over here and show her some support, y’all!
“But Anna,” I hear you cry, “ten bucks a pop for a novella? Isn’t that more than I’d be paying for a paperback?” Yes. Yes it is. But the beauty of this is, since Kit is selling it directly, she gets every last penny, and since she has an established track record of about a dozen books’ worth of awesome, I’m pretty damn sure $10 for a novella full of her words will be worth the price.
Also, she’s Kit. So go, my Internet armies! And tell her I sent you!
Word catchup
| February 1, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Mirror's Gate |
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Just to quickly cover the rest of the words I wrote on Mirror’s Gate while at Conflikt, this quicky post!
A brief snippet from Aleksi’s POV is now in place, although I think I’m going to have to work on that in the second draft. That snippet may actually need to be an entire chapter. But I want to get the first draft written first.
Yevanya is also now on camera, and has started off with a bang, attempting to sternly remind herself that no matter how severe the provocation, ladies of quality simply do not, do not, murder their cousins!
Written at Conflikt: 532
Chapter 1 total: 1,078
Mirror’s Gate total: 1,078
Amazon vs. Macmillan: FIGHT!
| February 1, 2010 | Posted by annathepiper under Publishing |
I spent most of this weekend at the filk convention Conflikt, and that was great fun, but even as a bunch of geeky music was going on I kept an eye on the kerfuffle that exploded between Amazon and Macmillan. The issue at hand appears to be the pricing of ebooks, and as an ebook author, this is of course Relevant to My Interests.
The issue as I understand it is that Amazon and Macmillan are having a huge dispute about how much ebooks ought to cost. Macmillan is aiming for a variable pricing structure from $14.99 down to as low as $5.99, whereas Amazon is standing adamant about $9.99 as a price point. (Side note: since a lot of the ebooks I buy tend to run lower than even $9.99, even when purchased on Amazon, the nuances of the ebook pricing structure are still a mystery to me. But I digress.) They couldn’t reach an agreement, and so Amazon up and pulled all Macmillan titles out of its database, not only the ebooks, but the print titles as well.
To wit, whoa.
Amazon has since capitulated but as of this morning, Macmillan authors are still reporting that new copies of their works are still not available for purchase on Amazon. And the agents I’m seeing chime in on the matter are pretty sure this isn’t over yet by a long shot. I’m still thinking hard about what I want to do about this, if anything. I’ve seen a lot of people asserting that this has been the last straw for them, and that they will cease doing any further business with Amazon; I’ve seen several authors now go and pull all links to Amazon’s pages for their works off their sites.
It’s just one great big mess, and I’m hoping it’ll settle itself out soon. ‘Cause again, Relevant to My Interests. Drollerie is tiny enough that I can’t exactly tell people not to buy Faerie Blood or Defiance on Amazon, if that’s where they want to buy it–especially given that neither of these titles have shown up on Barnes and Noble’s site yet, and Fictionwise doesn’t have Defiance, either. But man, it’s making me inclined more and more just to point folks directly at Drollerie’s own store. Where we don’t have any DRM anyway!
Link roundup, for those of you who want to see more on the matter:
- Agent Nathan Bransford has a good summation here
- John Scalzi is less than pleased
- Tobias Buckell goes into the differences between what print books cost and what ebooks cost, which is good reading if you want a handle on why ebooks might not necessarily be as cheap as you think they should be
- Charles Stross is also less than pleased, but attempts to provide an outsider’s guide to the fight
- And agent Kristin Nelson does a quick overview of what exactly Amazon and Macmillan have themselves said on the matter
- ETA: Agent Jennifer Jackson chimes in with her own link roundup and reactions
- ETA: And a kerfuffle of this magnitude just wouldn’t be complete without a word (or many!) from Fandom Wank!
- ETA: Scott Westerfeld has a good summation, and I think that by and large I agree with his analysis
- ETA: An interesting counterargument suggests that even if Amazon is the one who had to capitulate here, they’re still going to win this fight
Again, whoa. This is me over here in the corner, munching popcorn and waiting to see how this all plays out.
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