I deleted last night’s post about Amazon, as more facts have emerged. Right now, it does indeed look as if Amazon has pulled their direct sales link to all Macmillan titles over an asinine corporate dispute about e-book pricing. Neither side is innocent, and it’s the author’s livelihoods that are suffering. Chalk up another big FAILwin for corporate greed.
I’m not going to talk about DRM or e-book prices (since authors have no control over that stuff anyway), but I think my good friend and fellow Macmillan author Cherie Priest has an excellent and appropriate reaction here: I won’t be linking to Amazon in the future and I certainly won’t be buying a Kindle (not that I would have in the first place. FWIW, I like the Sony eReader quite a bit.)
Here are several lovely internet shops that allow my US readers (as far as I know, those of you in the UK, Canada and Germany remain unaffected) to procure my entire backlist:
Barnes & Noble
Indiebound
Powells
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On to more pleasant and pressing subjects!
“The Curse of Four”
Things accomplished in fiction: Figured out how to end this mess, made headway on The Plot, set unpleasant and inevitable events in motion.
Things accomplished in real life: Oh, god.
Other: The astute among you may noticed I’ve modified my goal from 40,000 to 30,000 words. 40,000 just seemed too long, considering the clip at which the plot started moving. I think I can frame out the ending today and tomorrow, and then I have to take a break and write “Born Under a Bad Sign”. I’ll have to connect some dots in edits, but this is going to end well, I think.
Other…
1. Gail Carriger, Soulless
It only took me a month to put something on the board, so here we go: I wanted to like Soulless. Really I did*. It has monsters and conspiracy and Victorian pseudo-science and many other things I would be considered the prime target audience for. Unfortunately, much like the heroine’s endlessly described outfits, there’s a lot of style and not much substance beneath it. The plot is a standard UF-first novel dealie about vampires disappearing and other, evol! vampires appearing, that would work equally well set in modern-day Indianapolis as in Victorian London. The cast consists of an unpretty heroine, a werewolf hottie, and a gay (vampire) best friend as well as the requisite shadowy UF villain who declaims his plan in the last 1/4 of the book in true Bondian fashion. Alexia Tarabotti, the heroine, is supposedly fat, ugly and dull, but as everyone else in the book wants to bone her, I call shenanigans. I did like the werewolf hottie (what can I say, I like werewolf hotties) except his dialogue and descriptions kept making me picture Gerard Butler, which is never a good thing. But that’s my issue, not the author’s. Overall, this was a first novel with first novel problems and I can’t be too hard on it for that. It’s a hell of a lot better than a lot of first novels I’ve been subjected to. However: the passion for the setting and the period details, transferred to the story and characters, would have made for a damn fine first novel, and it’s a shame they didn’t mesh a little better. A vast sea of wasted potential, I really hope Changeless steps it up, because with some tweaking Carriger’s on to something unique.
*And since it’s a new year and I’m an author, I want to reiterate that my opinions on a book don’t reflect on its own author, and I am not Bad, Mean or Just Jelus. I just like to read and I’m fond of litcrit, which is why I’m an author in the first place. And the seasons they go round and round. (That’s why the “tsbr” tag stands for Totally Subjective Book Reviews. Totally subjective, coming from the pure reader, not the author.)
I write speculative fiction, including but not limited to books about mages, werewolves, superheroes, steampunk monsters, fairies and demons. I have partially purple hair, collect comic books, do pinup modeling and photography in my copious spare time, and keep the music up way too loud.
I’m reading Soulless right now. I really want to like this book because it was screaming “something different” from the cover and the back blurb. Inside is a different story. It just isn’t moving along. Thanks for the honesty
I feel compelled to mention that there really aren’t more facts in those links–just more people citing the same source. I completely believe Amazon is guilty of pulling the dick move it looks like they did, but somehow it just bothers me to watch everyone decide it when we only have instinct and history to go on, nothing concrete.
That said, nothing will stop me from buying your books. Even if I cannot get them through any bookstore ever, I will pay hot men dressed as werewolves to bring you fistfuls of cash and a SASE big enough to fit a printed out manuscript
It seems I liked it more than you, though I agree with many of your issues. However, I think the heroine isn’t ugly by modern standards. It’s just that she’s got a Roman nose and olive skin, which makes her unmarriageable in polite London society. She could be Penelope Cruz, say, with a slightly bigger nose. A hottie to us, and attractive outside the narrow aesthetic (and racist) dictates of her class. She’s only deemed beautiful by outsiders: a Scottish werewolf, an American, and a vampire who’s seen fashions come and go for a few centuries. But she doesn’t see her beauty herself.
And that’s one of the things that makes the book interesting. Also, I like me some quantifiable soul.
Like you, I’m hoping that the potential is realized in the rest of the series.
Heh Gerard, such a man