Yeah but that’s Horror. Leisure picks up and expands a lot of those (for which I’m damn grateful because the thought of trying to otherwise track down some of what they’ve put into print gives me hives).
Does that also happen in fantasy? I thought the big money in fantasy was series series series.
The problem for a boutique press is that they make their money on scarcity - limited print runs of nice (often expensive) editions of books you’re not going to find anywhere else. Going e-pub potentially fights against that model in all sorts of interesting ways.
All you people reading Infinite Jest are making me feel bad for just reading I Shall Wear Midnight, Pratchett’s new Tiffany Aching novel. It’s enjoyable, but it’s very much a Pratchett book. He does love his ‘a concept is actually a sentient idea!’ plot conceit.
Mike Birbiglia, who you should know from This American Life, has a book of essays based on his off-Broadway one-man show, Sleepwalk With Me, out. Same title as the show. I’ve already got it on my Kindle. Can’t wait to dig into it.
Some Subterranean stuff is on www.webscriptions.net with the Baen ebooks. Picked up The Windup Girl there for my nook.
AWESOME! A Joe R Lansdale I hadn’t read!
edit: oh man, thanks a lot. there’s a TON of great stuff here which Amazon doesn’t have
I guess I should rephrase: virtually nothing I have ever seen in small press and balked at buying because of the price has ever been reprinted in a more affordable way.
This is true, but on the other hand, my understanding is that the author would typically go that route because they don’t expect to find the audience that would justify a more mainstream publishing option - books of short stories seem to be popular small press items, for example. And I’d think the environment of e-books would be a perfect venue for that sort of thing to find a wider and more long-term audience. Assuming, of course, that ebooks continue to prosper, which seems likely.
Leisure is its own particular brand of interesting these days, I’m afraid.
That being said, it can and does happen across the board. Before it went defunct, you got a bit of that from Meisha Merlin, for example, and not just Jim Moore’s horror stuff.
It depends. Single author short fiction’s largely a non-starter in the mass market arena. You may also see authors going that route to put out something that may not match their track record for whatever reason (subject matter, not part of an established series) so it doesn’t mess up their track record with the chains. It may be a way to get a book a first look in hopes of having other rights snapped up by one of the bigger houses - James Moore’s Red, for an example - if there was a “wait and see” attitude toward the book the first time it was shopped. There may be legacy contracts involved - gotta watch those “right of first refusal on your next project” clauses - or the author may have, say, a body of short fiction but no novel yet and the small publisher is willing to bank on that because of awards, critical buzz, potential long-term relationship, or because they genuinely like someone’s writing.
Good publishers, of course, like selling books. They generally also like keeping authors happy and productive, which means selling their books to as many people as possible; the alternative is no fun for anyone. That being said, if they’ve invested in a 1000 copy print run on acid free paper with an Alan M. Clark cover and autograph sheets from the author, the author of the foreword and the artist (and for the record, those things are a pain in the ass), there’s a good chance that it’s in their interest to sell out every single one of those before they start thinking about making less expensive editions available. But there are no hard and fast rules, and a lot depends on what rights the author negotiated in the original deal.
Ultimately the stuff will get out there. It’s just a question of when and how and who’s calling the shots on it, and short term it may not be in the publisher’s best interest to put an electronic edition out there immediately.
Wrapped Ship Breaker early last night as predicted and ended up liking it a bit more than I thought I would. There’s some fiction conceits which were a bit unrealistic (the protagonist learning to read at an amazing rate) but overall I liked it better than The Wind-Up Girl. Probably because I felt that half of WUG was extraneous to the book, where SB is parred down excellence. Amazingly violent for a kid’s book.
I started Sandman Slim, which is a hard boiled mage punk noir novel about a magician who was sold out by his circle of magelings and sent to hell. In hell he was treated as a bit of a novelty as he was the first living person to go to Hell (I’m guessing Orpheus doesn’t count). In Hell, our hero learned Hellion magic and became an arena fighter and eventually an assassin for a Duke of Hell (what happens to demons when they die isn’t really explained so far).
The book is suitably modern hard boiled and does make a good American counter part to Felix Castor and has just enough of an USA sheen that it doesn’t feel like left over Hellblazer scripts, but with just enough punk rock / goth / horror geek pandering that makes me wish I was friends with the guy on LastFM because I bet our tastes would be fairly similar.
I’m a little bit over a quarter of the way through and our hero is functionally immortal except against certain magics so there is the fear in the back of my head that this will turn Mary Sue at some point.
Oh and the guy was in hell for 11 years and was shocked and amazed at a Blackberry phone. Wait until he finds out about 9/11.
Are you talking about their abandonment of mass market for trade / ebook sales or something else?
I think the best response I can make here is “Yes.”
So is he Sam or Dean?
I’m not getting that reference
Both main characters have done extended tours of duty in hell.
I was more thinking that while the publisher may not be best served by going electronic, the author might find that their interests are best served by simply electronically self-publishing the sort of thing that has hitherto gone through small presses. Then again, maybe not. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the business end of books.
Finished the to date Retrieval Artist series. It’s really quite good. Some of the individual plots have a lot to recommend them (I loved Buried Deep) and the layer of continuity and character progression gets pretty rewarding.
I read I Shall Wear Midnight on the flight down to Florida last week, which angered Bahimiron because I finished it so quickly. I love the main character. I do. Tiffany is awesome. But the plot was…it felt lame. Almost like it wasn’t there and what was there, the villain, was Terry Pratchett reusing his old “an idea comes alive somehow and people have to deal with it” story. Again. It was never scary. There was never as real a threat from it (and there was supposed to be) as there was from just the regular characters interacting with their relationships and hardships. The character growth in this book is great, there were places where I laughed out loud and I teared up at the end. But there’s one place where he seems to entirely forget his own mythology (it can’t happen so soon, nooo!) and the rest just feels off somehow. Like there’s a great idea that the book just never really gets to because it doesn’t know how to deal with it. Honestly you could have cut the villain bits out of the book and it would have worked better. It was a good read and there’s some information revealed in it about the main character that I thought was a great, great twist and it’s given sort of off-hand so you don’t particularly notice, but it’s not his best.
I will still eagerly await the next one.
I’m re-reading Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series, mainly because I’d forgotten the little details and wanted a refresher before getting into his latest.
Holy shit, I forgot how awesome this series. I mean, I knew it was good, but I love how consistent the writing is.
Just finished reading The Shallows today, which has me seriously worried about my internet usage. I’m trying to think of some way I could arrange to have some sort of regular internet-holiday, but… the practical impediments are substantial. Also, I love the internet. Dammit.
Again, it depends on the deal. Joe Konrath makes a ton through self e-publishing, but as he’s quick to point out, you’re not Joe Konrath. So there are some circumstances under which some guaranteed money and marketing effort from a reputable publisher can be appealing and potentially more profitable than flogging your own stuff. For every Matt Wallace, there are a lot of folks who aren’t Matt Wallace, and who prefer going the other route if given a choice. I’m not judging either way, simply saying that depending on the actual deal that’s reached, it may or may not make sense.