I have in the past mentioned that one of the perks of my job is getting to read early manuscripts for upcoming books. Last year my friend and fellow Magical Words blogger DB Jackson asked if I might read his novel THIEFTAKER, which turned out to be a Revolutionary War era urban fantasy novel. I don’t *normally* send people emails while I’m reading their books, but I sent David at least two or three during the course of reading THIEFTAKER, saying things like “ACK YOU DID WHAT HOLY *CRAP* DUDE!”…
Tag: books my friends wrote
Holiday Blog, Part II
I have read TWO BOOKS already. Granted, one was Ursula’s DRAGONBREATH, which is short and has a lot of pictures, but one takes victories where one can. The other is Alethea Kontis’s ENCHANTED. Now, Alethea is this person I met at WFC in Austin several years back. She and Ed Schubert and some others for some reason took pity on me as I was sitting there, pathetic and alone, on the bus to the convention hotel, or maybe at breakfast, or something. I don’t really remember the details, mostly because…
Oh, hell.
One of my favorite authors, Ann (AC) Crispin, has announced she’s been fighting cancer. The chemo appears to be working, which is fantastic, but the chemo has been going on for months already and is expected to continue through the summer. This means her Starbridge book sales are basically her only income this year. I’ve mentioned STARBRIDGE before on this blog. I vividly remember reading the first book, mostly because I’d seen it several times in the bookstore and never bought it, because I didn’t like the cover very much…
some things make a post
The e-book pricing conversation showed a fair amount of support for “mass market paperback price minus 10-20%”, which is pretty interesting. Thank you all for the contributions–coming from a position where I’m looking at doing a bit of self-publishing, it’s really terrific to get that feedback from, well, potential customers, to be blunt about it. :) In other news, I’m teaching a writing course (with an emphasis on fantasy fiction, of course, but equally of course I think any writing course can be generally applied if anything sensible is said…
Hot good god damn!
Tor Books has just announced it’s going DRM-free on all its e-books. I am so freaking filled with squee over this that I cannot *tell* you. DRM (digital rights management) is one of the things that permits Amazon to have a throttlehold on e-book sales: you can only buy a Kindle book for a Kindle reader, which means if you ever change e-readers you have to either re-buy everything or (realistically) go to the trouble of cracking/converting the DRM, or (even more realistically) pirating the books. But Tor is firing…