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Posts Tagged ‘book view cafe’

“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.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/605261.html. Comment here or there.

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? ^_^

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/601529.html. Comment here or there.

Writing Fight Scene: now an ebook!

Remember how I was writing all those posts on how to write fight scenes? Well, it occurred to me that it might be nice to have them collated in a much easier-to-read format. And, y’know, to revise and expand them while I was at it.

Writing Fight Scenes coverLadies, gentlemen, and swordspeople of all types, I give you Writing Fight Scenes: The Ebook Version. Complete with all the posts from the blog series (now in improved order, with additional thoughts), plus a few illustrative examples. It is, of course, on sale at Book View Cafe, along with Kobo, Barnes and Noble (Nook), and Amazon (Kindle).

(This, by the way, is why I chose to put Lies and Prophecy on special at BVC this month. Not just to celebrate my birthday, but also because I knew I had this coming out, too. It’ll stay a dollar off until the end of the month.)

If you know of people for whom this might be of interest, please do point them at it! Nonfiction is sort of a new thing for me, so signal-boosting would be much appreciated.

Happy my birthday to you!

I’m borrowing my approach from [personal profile] mrissa, who says, quite reasonably, that one should of course hope for others to have a happy time of it on one’s own birthday.

I can’t be a proper hobbit and give presents to you all, but I do have one thing: for the entire month of September, Lies and Prophecy is a dollar off at Book View Cafe. (I’m also going to have something else for you guys later this month, but it isn’t ready quite yet.)

Have a lovely day! I certainly intend to.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/596327.html. Comment here or there.

Big news at Book View Cafe

Y’all, I have been sitting on this for months. You have no idea how good I’ve been, not even hinting at it before now.

Book View Cafe Signs Deal with Audible

This thing is huge. More than a hundred titles, and that’s just the beginning; I can’t divulge details, but we’re going to continue working with Audible going forward, creating audio adaptations for more of our catalogue. (So while neither Lies and Prophecy nor Deeds of Men are part of this deal, there might be news about them at some point in the future. Maybe. <cough cough>)

And honestly, this is only the most publicly visible awesome thing that’s been happening at BVC. We have partnerships with places like Overdrive, which supplies ebooks to libraries, and are even looking into selling foreign rights. Day by day — thanks to the efforts of my fellow members — the organization is growing into something really amazing.

(Oh, and check out our spiffy new front page while you’re at it. Isn’t it shiny?)

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Deeds of Men, redux

Some of you may recall that years ago, just before In Ashes Lie came out, I released a novella called Deeds of Men, which took place before that novel and after Midnight Never Come. It was originally a promotional freebie, but after a while I took down the free version and put it on sale at Amazon, mostly as a random experiment — I knew zip about ebooks at the time. Despite that ignorance (which included things like me not bothering to give it a proper cover), it’s sold some copies over the years, though not a huge number.

Now that I’m a member of Book View Cafe, I decided to do it over again, this time the right way. It has a spiffy-looking cover, courtesy of Chris Rawlins and Leah Cutter, and some revisions (most of them minor; one correcting a narrative choice I’ve regretted ever since I released the novella), and this time it got formatted by somebody who knows what he’s doing (the inestimable Chris Dolley). That link will take you to the BVC site, where you can buy it in epub and mobi formats, good for most e-reading devices, Kindle included. It’s also up on Amazon, and should be live on the B&N and Kobo sites in the next day or so.

A special note about Kindles: if you already bought the novella from Amazon, I think, though I’m not certain, that you should be able to download the new version as an update, without having to pay for it again. I’d love to have that confirmed, so if you’re in that camp, please let me know.

For those who are wondering, the story does contain some spoilers for Midnight Never Come, though only of an aftermath-y sort — it doesn’t say what happened, just shows the characters where they are as a result. Otherwise it’s only really full of spoilers for early seventeenth-century European politics. 😛

And stay tuned for more news in the next few days, about what I’m doing next with BVC . . . .

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various bits of news

1) Sure, I’ll be kind and put the big one first. I’ve sold a story to Tor.com! “Mad Maudlin,” a novelette based on the folksong variously known as “Bedlam Boys” and “Tom o’Bedlam.” It won’t be published until late this year or early next, but I’m extremely pleased nonetheless.

2) One straggler from the ANHoD blog tour: an interview with me at LibraryThing, wherein (among other things) I divulge how [profile] kniedzw and I approached the most important question one must consider upon moving in together: whether to combine libraries or not.

3) Latest post at BVC is on superstitions.

Edited to add:
4) A Natural History of Dragons is #8 on the Locus bestseller list for May. Go, little book, go!

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two links

Time for a post up at BVC, on spells and folklore.

Also, I’m participating in “Women in SF&F” month at Fantasy Book Cafe, along with a great many other people: Courtney Shafer, Jan DeLima, Mur Lafferty, Patricia McKillip, Angie (of Angieville), Deborah Coates, Rachel Neumeier, Julie Czerneda, Janice (of SpecFic Romantic), Lois McMaster Bujold, Sue (of Coffee, Cookies, and Chili Peppers), Lane Robins, Ana and Thea (of Book Smugglers), Sherwood Smith, Karin Lowachee, Jacqueline Carey, and Renay (of Lady Business) — and that’s just the roster so far. My contribution is a discussion of why I chose to include sexism in the world of Lady Trent’s memoirs.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/586118.html. Comment here or there.

news, posts, ets ceteras, I HAVE A TITLE

I’m drowning in revisions right now (due Monday; I’m almost done; I just need my brain to keep working a few days more), but I’m surfacing long enough to share a few things.

First: YOU GUYS YOU GUYS YOU GUYS I FINALLY HAVE A TITLE. The sequel to A Natural History of Dragons will be called The Tropic of Serpents.

(Now I just need to go put that phrase in the book somewhere.)

Next, story sale! To the charity anthology Neverland’s Library, which will be funded through Kickstarter, and 50% of whose profits will go to First Book. The story in question is “Centuries of Kings,” based on several Chinese and Japanese folktales.

Finally, I have a couple of posts up in different places, that I hadn’t yet linked here. One is over at Darkeva’s blog, talking about how I developed the habit of choosing music for a story while working on the original draft of Lies and Prophecy. The other is my biweekly post at BVC, talking about how folklore adds another later to the world around you.

Time for me to go work some more on revising The Tropic of Serpents. (I am going to be using the title incessantly for a little while, now that I have it to use.)

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/582815.html. Comment here or there.

New Releases from Book View Cafe

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a final pack of dragons

Slightly belated, the final round-up for the blog tour. There will be other posts still forthcoming, but only in the sense that, y’know, I talk about my books sometimes, in interviews or guest posts or whatever. This is the last of the actual formal book tour.

***

Interviews:

The Sleeps With Monsters interview isn’t about ANHoD specifically (but then again, by this time that’s probably a point in its favor). Ditto the Skiffy and Fanty podcast, which isn’t even really an interview per se; it’s just us talking about mythology and fantasy and Star Trek and I can’t even remember what all.

Guest posts:

Again, that last one isn’t ANHoD-specific; it’s more of a post I was asked to write, in which I mention ANHoD in the course of discussing how I name characters. But as long as I’m rounding up everything I’ve been posting on the internet lately, I might as well include it.

In that vein, I’ll also mention my most recent BVC post is “The folklore mode of fantasy,” in which I present my own personal home-brewed theory of which folkloric style fantasy as a whole most closely resembles.

And that’s it for now. I’m revising the second book (and also facing some hassle wrt getting certain financial records for tax purposes), so I may be scarce around here for a bit.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/580700.html. Comment here or there.

time for more dragons!

But first, a reminder: only a few days left to get a letter from Lady Trent. (If you’ve already written to her, the reply will be on its way shortly — I delayed a little bit in order to get something cool to include with the note.)

***

New interview at The Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia, another interview at Short and Sweet Book Reviews, and a guest post at Head Stuck in a Book. There were supposed to be a couple of others, too, but the scheduling of those appears to have gone astray.

***

I do, however, have my usual biweekly post up at BVC: “It happened to my cousin’s best friend’s roommate,” wherein I discuss legends. Comment over there!

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577576.html. Comment here or there.

Recent offerings from Book View Cafe

book not done book not done book not done <pant pant pant>

But I’m surfacing long enough to post something I’ve had sitting around for weeks, which is the list of recent offerings from BVC. Before I get into the full list, I want to call out this one particularly:

Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, edited by Nisi Shawl

Eleven original stories by recipients of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship (2007 through 2012), plus a reprint of “Speech Sounds” by the scholarship’s namesake, Octavia E. Butler. This anthology also includes a brief memoir of Butler by her Clarion classmate Vonda N. McIntyre and an introduction by Nalo Hopkinson.

Every year, the Carl Brandon Society, whose goal is to increase diversity in the field of science fiction, presents scholarships to two students of color accepted to the prestigious Clarion and Clarion West writers’ workshops. The scholarships, named in honor of the brilliant African-American writer Octavia Butler, pay workshop tuition and housing fees for the recipients. Since 2007, they have made it possible for eleven students to attend the workshops.

Give a little, get a free ebook.

If you contribute a mere $8.01 to the scholarship fund, you can download Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, an ebook anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories by these students — the voices of the new generation of writers of color in speculative fiction.

This special ebook is available only until June 22, 2013, Octavia’s birthday. She would have been sixty-six this year.

Octavia taught at Clarion and Clarion West, and provided enormous support there — and elsewhere — to other writers of color. Through these scholarships, she continues to do so.

Help continue Octavia’s work.

Other new books, from Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Pati Nagle, Gregory Frost, and David D. Levine

two follow-up things

I forgot to mention that from now through December 17th, Dear Author has a coupon for Lies and Prophecy, offering $1 off purchases of that book at Book View Cafe. Get it while the getting’s good!

Also, last week I participated in BVC’s blog series Celebrating Ursula K. Le Guin. That link will take you to all the posts for the week; mine, “No Need to Apologize,” tells the tale of The Language of the Night and how that collection changed the direction of my life.

Welcome to Welton, and other BVC offerings

If I’d been smart, I would have this ready to go a few months ago. But: “Welcome to Welton,” the prequel novella to Lies and Prophecy, is now available as a proper ebook from Book View Cafe. It’s free for the downloading, as either epub or mobi; you can also still read it on my site.

Other things have been coming out from BVC as well; I can only blame the madness of November for me being remiss in posting about the October releases. So here is two months’ worth, for your delectation:

Including something from Ursula K. Le Guin – that I helped proofread!