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Posts Tagged ‘book view cafe’

Onyx Court 1 and 2 soon to be out as ebooks

I’ve been holding off on a whole lot of news while I waited for the new site to go live; now that it has, you should expect a number of things in quick succession. 🙂

Since Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie have reverted to me in the U.S., I’m putting out ebook editions of them through Book View Cafe. If you click on those title links, you’ll find you can pre-order the ebooks at a number of sites, including Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, and Kobo; or if you would prefer to buy from Book View Cafe, Barnes and Noble, or Waterstones, those will be available soon. Midnight will be out on the 17th (that is, next Tuesday), and Ashes the week after.

Two more Dice Tales posts up

Because I was traveling last Monday, I neglected to link to that week’s Dice Tales post at Book View Cafe: Shared Delusions,” discussing the techniques gamers use to help everyone imagine the same thing (or at least a close enough facsimile thereof) while telling the story. This week’s post expands on one aspect of that and talks about “Costuming.”

Comment over there!

Dice Tales at BVC – No Takebacks

My newest Dice Tales post is up at Book View Cafe: No Takebacks, in which I talk about the way that RPGs don’t really allow for revision, and what that does to the story. Comment over there!

I’ll also mention that since the BVC WordPress configuration doesn’t display the series name, I’ve switched to using a tag to sort all the Dice Tales posts. So if you’re looking for one easy way to pull them all up, now you have it!

“Dice Tales” at Book View Cafe

I’ve started blogging at Book View Cafe again, this time on one of my favorite topics: role-playing games! Specifically, RPGs as a method of storytelling, and how that interrelates with and differs from the more conventional kind of storytelling I do as an author. There are three posts up so far, one introductory piece to launch the series, one on the dramatis personae of an RPG, and one on mechanics. New installments will be posted each Sunday morning. Comments are off here; share your thoughts over there instead!

BVC Year-End Sale

I’ve been remiss in advertising this, largely because I’ve had my head buried in the first draft of the next Memoir. (Current word count: 33,191, and Isabella’s brother is endearing himself to me for being the kind of guy who will say things other characters won’t.) BUT! Time has not yet run out, for me or for you!

Book View Cafe is having an ENORMOUS sale right now, continuing through January 1st. I will not attempt to list all the participating titles, because omgwtfbbq there are a lot of them — but Lies and Prophecy is one of them. Since one of the other things eating my head right now is revisions on Chains and Memory, this is a dandy time to pick up the first book, if you haven’t already. Or, y’know, one of the other splendid offerings. Or all of the above! (Now I’m wondering if any crazy person has actually bought every single sale title, just for the heck of it.)

You have a few days left to take advantage of this, though not as many as you might have had my brain not been snack food for my current obligations. Should still be enough time, though. Go forth and enjoy!

in honor of the season, I give you: Monstrous Beauty

Some years ago, my brain got stuck in a certain gear and cranked out seven rather dark fairy-tale retellings. In this brave new world of ebooks, it is quite easy for me to put them together for your Halloween delectation:

Brennan-MonstrousBeauty200x300

It may be purchased from one (or more!) of the following fine retailers:

(I do hope to get it up in iTunes before long, but the roadblocks they put in the way make that difficult.)

Edited to add: Sorry, this was meant to go up at 1 p.m. rather than 1 a.m., which would have given Barnes and Noble time to fix whatever is currently borked about their system — they’re not listing Monstrous Beauty for sale yet, and their back end is down so I can’t attempt to figure out why (which possibly is why). The Amazon links were broken just because of a c&p error; sorry about that. They should be okay now.

Amazon is at it again

The one bright spot is, people are starting to notice.

In 2008, Amazon got into a pissing contest with Hachette, the smallest of the large publishers (and owners of Orbit, who published my first four novels). In 2010, it was Macmillan (owners of Tor, my current publisher). In 2012, Penguin. And now, in 2014, we’ve wrapped back around to Hachette. Books published by subsidaries of Hachette are currently shipping “in 2 to 5 weeks” — including Warrior, Witch, Midnight Never Come, and In Ashes Lie. Is it because there’s a problem with Hachette? Are they not supplying stock to Amazon in a timely fashion?

Nope. It’s because Amazon is trying, once again, to use its market share to strong-arm publishers into accepting unfavorable terms. Unfavorable for the publishers, unfavorable for writers — and ultimately, unfavorable for readers.

This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s an ongoing pattern of behavior. It’s something people have been warning about for years, but the response has usually been that Amazon is your friend. They sell things cheaply and ship really fast (just don’t think about how they treat their employees), and hey, 70% royalties on ebooks! Except that Amazon is demonstrably willing to tank the customer experience if it will help them gain more power in the marketplace. And the more they control, the less friendly they become. They are the abusive boyfriend who systematically isolates you from everybody in your life and then, once you have nowhere else to turn, shows his true colors.

If we had better anti-trust legislation in this country, Amazon would have been stopped long before this. But we don’t, and they haven’t been.

Back when they pulled the buy buttons off Macmillan books as a “negotiating tool,” I removed the Amazon links from my website. (Mostly. Scanning the pages, I see I left the Book Depository there; I don’t know if they hadn’t yet been bought by Amazon at the time.) I’m going to go through and scrub the remainder, with two exceptions: Audible (also owned by Amazon, but they are the publisher of my audio editions) and Kindle Direct Publishing (for the BVC-published ebooks). Notice a pattern there? I’m leaving up the links where Amazon has enough power over me that I can’t just walk away from them. I don’t like it, but I don’t feel I can choose differently. More than half of my ebook sales come via Amazon, and there is no way to buy the audiobooks that doesn’t put money in their pocket.

But they don’t control everything, at least not yet. You can get my books from Barnes and Noble — ebook and print alike. They aren’t perfect, but they’re Amazon’s main competitor. Or you can buy from Powell’s. Or from IndieBound. Or Books-a-Million. Or Indigo, if you’re Canadian. You can also get my ebooks from Book View Cafe or Kobo (and by the way, if you’re the sort of person who’s motivated by Amazon’s “author-friendly” habit of paying a 70% royalty, note that Kobo pays the same, while BVC pays me a 95% royalty instead). Maybe it won’t be as convenient as Amazon; you won’t get free two-day shipping. But that convenience is the bait: they use it to shift more and more business into their hands, and then they use what they hold to change the market to benefit them.

It isn’t illegal. But it also isn’t something I care to support. There are alternatives, and I encourage you to use them.

Half-Off PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING

Okay, I exaggerate — but only a little.

Did you get an e-reader for Christmas? Or a little extra cash to blow where you please? Or are you just hungry for new things to read? Book View Cafe is having an ENORMOUS sale from now through January 6th. No, seriously: there are five pages of things on sale right now, in genres ranging from fantasy to science fiction to romance to mystery to nonfiction.

Including three titles of my own! Lies and Prophecy, Deeds of Men, and Writing Fight Scenes are all half-off right now — that’s half off the price listed on those pages, as the way we’re handling the back end of the sale is just to apply the discount at checkout, rather than changing every book page.

As mentioned before, this lasts through January 6th, so you have plenty of time to browse the whole slate. (Nice thing about ebooks is, we don’t run out of stock.) There are things to cater to many tastes in there; you might find more things to enjoy.

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catching up on the (fiction-related) news

It’s taken me about a week to regenerate much brain, with most of what I could spare going to working on the next of the Memoirs. But I have some now, and so you get a news batch!

First of all, A Natural History of Dragons is in the semifinal round for Best Fantasy of 2013 over on Goodreads. I’m not saying you should go vote for it or anything. I’m just, y’know, mentioning.

you should totally go vote for it

Next up, Book View Café has a fun new anthology out: Mad Science Café. This debuted while I was out of the country, so I’m a bit behind the curve in announcing it, but it’s pretty much what the title would lead you to expect, i.e. lots of stories about Science Gone Wrong (Or Very, Very Right). It reprints my story “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes,” aka the Werewolf Fake Academic Paper story, so if you missed it when it first came out in Ekaterina Sedia’s Running with the Pack, here’s your chance!

I’m also in another anthology! Apex Magazine has put out The Book of Apex: Volume 4, which collects fifteen issues’ worth of the magazine, including my own “Waiting for Beauty.” That one’s available in print as well as electronic formats.

Speaking of anthologies (no, we’re not done yet), there’s an excerpt from “Centuries of Kings” up at Bookworm Blues. Because I was out of the country when that went up, the Kickstarter linked is over and done with (after successfully raising its target and more). But still, you can get a taster of the story, which will be in Neverland’s Library.

And finally, not about me: Mike Allen ([profile] time_shark), editor, poet, and fiction writer, has a novel out! The Black Fire Concerto, about which people have said many good things. It has a blurb from Tanith Lee! “A prize for the multitude of fans who relish strong Grand Guignol with their sword and sorcery.” Mike is, of course, the fellow who has brought you all four Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, not to mention Mythic Delirium and other such projects. If you dig horror, you should definitely check this out.

. . . did I mention that A Natural History of Dragons is up for a vote? ^_^

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