Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Attempt number two at posting: I don't know if it's having so many tabs open (with links I've been collecting to share here) that's making Chrome slow down. I'm also not sure how my last livejournal tab got closed before posting (though that could have just been my slippery fingers). But I figure I'd better share some of this stuff and see if that speeds up my work process on this end.

• In Reads takes a look at the Amazon royalty structure for Kindle books, and questions whether the cut off point for high royalties at $2.99 is fair. (Books priced between $2.99 and $9.99 receive 70% royalties; below $2.99 they receive 35%.) With Amazon pitching a new tablet to compete with the iPad, I bet we see this type of conversation keep cropping up.


• When the agency model first came out, I, and others, questioned who was benefiting. From what I knew from working with physical books at a bookstore, the publisher sets a cover price, charges retailers a percentage of that price, and the retailer decides how to price it to best sell the books to their customers. The agency model takes away the retailer's options to price the book for their customers -- which looks to me like it's shorting the consumers. I couldn't figure out the benefit to the publishers for this, but apparently, it's that they could sell their books to Apple. And now, according to Business Week, Apple and the publishers who have embraced the agency model are facing a suit for e-book price fixing. So my feeling that there was something fishy about the model is not a unique thought!


• A writer for the Guardian asks, again, if e-books are ushering print out. According to the commenters, the answer is still no.


• Via Rob Schmidt from Newspaper Rock, National Geographic tested the representation of the Apache in the Cowboys and Aliens movie. Some of the things I mentioned in my review came up; other things they caught I did short pieces on in the history bits of C&AII. For example, War Hawk (who doesn't have a traditional Apache name) talks a little about naming conventions here. Apache names reflected something about their personal nature, and during the time in which C&AII is set, a lot of those names began with "Angry." I can't track down my original sources on that information, but photographer Rico Leffana wrote about some of that same history in a short essay on Fort Apache.

In the meantime -- plenty of writing and editing work keeping this Abbott busy! On the fun side, Bug and I both went on our first ride on the electric trolley, which I've written about briefly on Branford Patch, and had a great time.

A couple of articles caught my attention lately, one courtesy of Hippo tech columnist (and old writer buddy of mine) John (Jack) Andrews (who's over on twitter as @citizenjaq). Jack tackles the whole LCD vs. e-ink phenomenon that's happening as tablets get more and more popular. I've expressed my preferences here before: I don't like to read on an LCD screen if I can avoid it. It takes something that really captivates me to get me to sit and read it in full on my computer screen. Before I got my nook, I'd print out a manuscript or e-galley to read. (Having read physical manuscripts for this year's Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, I can safely say it's something I hadn't missed!) Before my nice little, one real function e-ink device, e-books were a pain. Now? Love them! I'm actually buying them preferentially these days, in part to save on shelf space and in part because they're easier.

But I get that the multi-function tablets are the wave of the future. I suspect that a tablet, or a tablet's successor, will eventually replace my net book, since they give the appearance of being better at the things the I had understood net book was designed to be good at (eg. streaming media). Jack's article gives me some hope for the e-ink resurgence, though -- and, as I've posited before, it may depend on getting that color e-ink working.

Given the way my e-book reading pattern followed my purchase of a device, the other article that caught my eye didn't surprise me, but it did make me stop to think for a moment. Gideon Spainer at the online London Evening Standard shows how the release of new devices creates a huge uptick in e-book sales. He seems to be cautioning that e-book sales depend on these new devices being released -- and, given the attitudes about technology that consumers tend to have (i.e. new gadgets are shiny!), I think he's partly right.

But I also think the chart in the article that shows these sales figures has a general shape of going upward. Even if no new devices were released (not likely to happen, given that B&N is shipping their new touchscreen e-ink nook today, according to their press release as covered by SlashGear), e-books are still selling more copies than they were in 2007. Maybe the upswing in sales isn't as much between nifty new products, but the general trend is still an increase -- and I don't think that's likely to change any time soon.

No guest blog today, in honor of my first participation in a huge giveaway contest. I've been talking about Barbara Vey's anniversary bash all week, and today's party, set in a castle, features a give away of a copy of Into the Reach, alongside a number of other amazing prizes (like e-readers!). Please pop by and comment!

I figure it's been a long time since I posted anything from the "Redemption Trilogy" on the blog, so in honor of Into the Reach being a prize, I thought I'd post an excerpt. Enjoy!

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In his years as a knight, he’d learned that there were two types of people in the world: those who thought that being called on by their superior commander was a good thing, and those who wondered, even when they were not guilty, what they had done wrong. And even though every time he’d been called upon by his superiors it was to be given a greater opportunity to serve his people and his city, he was the second type.

So now, as he, Lydia, Taru, and the Osarian called Nara, waited to be let in to Watchman Johnny Twostep’s office, he felt the same old anxiety return. His shoulders clenched beneath his heavy armor, and trails of nervous sweat added to the dampness his scalp beneath his hair, still sticky from the heat of combat. When they were finally let in, Taru and Lydia practically flowed into the office with the assurance that they were about to be praised for having saved the lives of villagers—though Taru looked more serious than Kennerly had seen him before. He and Nara both hung back, and when he glanced over at her, he saw the guilty expression on her face that he knew he wore himself.

“Well,” he muttered to her, offering his elbow, “shall we face our fates with honor?”

She looked at him in surprise, but put her hand gently on his elbow, and they stepped into the room together.

For a change, I'm actually the guest blogger instead of the blog hostee! lbickle was kind enough to offer me a little space on not one, but three of her blogs! You can find my little piece on writing in other people's worlds here at Laura's main blog or at her Alayna Williams blog.

I should have several more spots coming up soon -- I may have a couple of podcasts upcoming, along with an interview conducted by editor extraordinaire, Shawn Merwin. Hurrah for celebrating the e-book release!

I also now have a facebook fan page where I'll be linking to all of these crazy guest blogs and interviews and such.

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A thought for the day: I've discovered that when I pick up a book and expect not to like it, and then end up discovering that I really do enjoy it, I like it more than I would have if I'd thought I was going to love it. Conversely, when I pick up a book I expect to like, and I don't, I'm even more disappointed and feel more dislike than I might have with no expectations.

I keep having to turn the pages of my calendar. Time stops for no writer, it seems. Unless you have one of those really nacky time-stopping devices, but those are, admittedly, tough to come by, especially in this economy.

As a short update, I thought I'd share the message I sent out to my mailing list (and a couple of plugs for other writers at the end--give it a look!)

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It's been a long time between updates, largely because I've been busy with review assignments and reference book work, which aren't so exciting to tell you about. I did recently begin writing a column for Branford Patch, called "The Town with Five Main Streets." It's a weekly column about the history of Branford, Connecticut, and starting next week, it's taking on a question and answer format. So, if you have a question about Branford's history, or just want to give me some new material to research, I hope you'll go check out the column and post either in the comments or in the Q&A area of Branford Patch.

If you're more interested in my fiction, and maybe you haven't gotten the chance to read Into the Reach and Departure, as they became hard to track down in print, I'm pleased to announce that they're available as e-books through DriveThruRPG! The rights have been released from the publisher back to me, and I'm delighted to be working with Matt McElroy, who is my review editor at Flames Rising, to make them available again as e-books. The really good news is that I'll have the chance to release Regaining Home, the third book in the trilogy, in the same format! The manuscript has been completed for a long time, but the editorial process stalled out before we could release it. I don't have a date yet for when I'm likely to make it available, but you can rest assured that instead of "maybe it will be released eventually," it will definitely be coming into e-print. The speed with which I'm able to get the edits done and the files ready for e-book may depend on how sales of the first two books progress -- meaning, I can take time away from other paying work more easily if I know I have an audience waiting.

I made a quick link to my DriveThru store here: http://tinyurl.com/aja-ebooks, but you can also go to DriveThruRPG.com and search for Alana Abbott (which brings up several other books I've contributed to) or Virgil and Beatrice, which is the store name for everything I list on DriveThru.

Thanks to everyone here for your continued interest in my writing, and your support of my career!

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Speaking of books that are out...

Mark Henry/mdhenry's Road Trip of the Living Dead is out in mass market! If you didn't buy it as a trade, it's now nicely pocket sized. (It's also available as an e-book at a reduced price.)

Anton Strout/antonstrout has the fourth book of his Simon Canderous series, Dead Waters, releasing at the end of the month. Join the facebook party!

Looking to the beginning of March, watch out for Accidentally Catty, the latest Accidental book by Dakota Cassidy.

It's quite a line up! Whatever you're doing with your February, get out there and read something fun!

Did you all like my disappearing act? Next, I'll saw my assistant in half! But really, what have I been up to in the past month?

• Copyediting. A lot.


• Watching Leverage. (Thanks to lyster and publius513 for the recommendation!)


• Watching Eureka, on which my friend Margaret Dunlap is a writing assistant.


• Realizing that catching up on back episodes of cool TV shows takes a bite out of my reading time.


• Spending time with Bug, who is awesome and amazing to watch as she learns all about the world.


• Going to kempo with Twostripe.


• Reading books to review. I'm all caught up on my PW reading, but I have a review to write, and a pile of SLJ books, and some Flames Rising books and comics still piled up.


• Writing fake romance novel back cover blurbs as a game for a friend. I may post some here at some point, with the names changed to protect the innocent (or not so innocent, as the case may be).


• Reading books for fun. I just finished Ally Carter's Only the Good Spy Young and am reading Breaking Waves on my nook. (Breaking Waves is an anthology edited by tltrent to raise funds for the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund. Great writing and a worthy cause? It's totally worth checking out.)


• Keeping up on industry news. The NYTimes published an article about color e-ink displays. Remember how I was asking about this earlier this year? Yay news!


• Sending the Viking Saga team through Europe. This weekend: Italy! Next weekend: Crossover game with the Mythic Greece group! I can hardly wait.


• Finishing up at the library. I've decided I can spend my time more the way I'd like to spend my time -- on both writing/editing and on being a mom -- without those library hours. As much as I love my coworkers and my library, it's a good move. And we'll still be storytime regulars.


• Traveling for cool events. Last night I went to see Abundance with niliphim. Friends of the blog Mark Vecchio and Richard Vaden are involved in the production (Mark is the director; Rich is performing). If you're in Pioneer Valley over the next two days, go see it! And check out this article about the production, and a sense of the mythic in the Old West.

And finally, I've been writing. Not as much as I'd like, but I am doing it. I'm back to owing lyster a chapter of Blood and Tumult, but I'm also working on the sooper sekrit project -- which I can now say is a comic, and as soon as I tell my editor I'm going to start talking about it, I'll start writing about it here! The portion I'm working on is actually due sooner rather than later, so if I want to talk about the process, it'll have to be coming up soon!

In honor of my return, and to help with my going-digital initiative, I'm giving away my mass market copy of Happy Hour of the Damned by Mark Henry. Answer the following question by Friday the 24th, and I'll pick a random winner!

If you were stranded on a deserted island (with comfortable amenities and the knowledge that you'd be rescued within a week), what five books would you want to have in your luggage?

Well, I've written a couple of book reviews and an essay, and I've done a lot of copyediting. Obviously, I've not done a lot of blogging. I'm brainstorming a new short story, which is exciting. And I'm thinking about the fiction I set aside for the past year, and I'm sort of wondering if, when you leave a story alone that long, is it yours any more? Is it the story you're meant to tell if you can set it down and walk away from it for a full year? I'm not sure, and I wonder if it means I need to start somewhere else in the story.

But mostly pondering and not a lot of action. I do have linky goodness, however, so here's what I've been reading online this week:

• Friend of the blog Carrie Vaughn has a great post on the rise of urban fantasy at Tor.com.
  
• From jeff_duntemann, DIRIGIBLES!
  
• QuestionRiot by dcopulsky has an interview up with a graduate student in video game production.
  
• Lastly, a PW article on how the format falling most as the ebook rises is actually the mass market. It shouldn't surprise me that this is the case, given the similarity in pricing between the two formats, and yet, it sort of did. I didn't expect to see mass markets take a hit.
  

That's it for today. Maybe I'll get back up to having a guest blog tomorrow -- I'm reading the Charlotte Guest Mabinogion on my nook (among other e-books, like a good chunk of the library of sartorias's titles, which I've acquired a number of), and her introduction had some words of interest on myth that, if I can track them down again, were worth sharing.

After the weekend, Amazon said to the world, "Well, we can't help but do what Macmillan says, because they have a monopoly on their own titles." (Well, that's one way to put it.) The wonderful Barbara Vey of Beyond Her Book posted about it as it was happening, with both Amazon's letter to the public and Macmillan's letter to the public side by side. Another great article on Paid Content gives a breakdown of why this is actually a much better deal for Amazon, as far as making money goes. So why the fuss? (And why hasn't Amazon put the Buy buttons back on Macmillan books yet?) Suspicion says that this was all done so Amazon can say, "Hey, it's not our fault that the mean, horrible publishers are charging too much for e-books, consumers. We tried to protect you."

Honestly, Amazon, I can protect my own wallet, thanks. I spend a pretty minimal amount on e-books, have found plenty legal e-books for free (and know there are way more available on Project Gutenberg), and I still like my print books. Consumers will ultimately be the force behind how e-books are priced, without so many shenanigans, I hope. (Correspondent jeff_duntemann pointed out in the last entry that he thinks 50% off of the print price is about right -- of all of the industry pros I know, he's the guy I'd expect to have a handle on this, so I have a feeling he's in the right ballpark.)

One of the things that Barbara points out that once again scares me about the power of Amazon & Kindle is that any of the free previews available on Kindle for Macmillan titles vanished from the Kindles of the folks who had downloaded them already. They're overusing that Big Brother potential, and I hope they realize folks find it annoying (and worse).

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But on to happier things. Do you know how many book birthdays there have been lately? First, mdhenry had Happy Hour of the Damned come out in mass market. (There are contests all over the interwebz to support this release: see Bitten by Books as well as the Home Pages of Michele Bardsley, Stacia Kane, and fellow book birthdayer Dakota Cassidy, who just birthed Accidentally Demonic.) Nalini Singh's Archangel's Kiss, the second in her new series, is now on shelves. And in a few days, frost_light's first Cat & Bones spin off, First Drop of Crimson, is being released. Whew, what a lot of birthdays!

Jeaniene's publisher is actually offering a sneak peak of First Drop of Crimson over at the HarperCollins site. It's almost a full fifth of the book, so if you can't wait, check it out now. Jeaniene also does super nifty book trailers, so I'm posting one below. She's also got a contest at Bitten by Books that's worth checking out.



So, tons of new books, contests, and prizes. Is it time to go shopping or what?

So, I've made the decision to keep the Nook. After reading an e-ARC on it with tremendous success and using it for Substrate (with bookmarks, since I hadn't figured out the notation function yet--I'll get to that), I was pretty well determined to keep it. In the last week, I discovered that the secret to making notations on side-loaded content (content not purchased/gotten from B&N) is to have them as ePub files instead of PDFs. Ah ha! What can you convert to an ePub? Word docs, PDFs, etc., etc. What program do you use to do so? The much raved-about Calibre e-book manager.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a solution to my complaints.

Now, would I have liked to have an e-book reader that just magically had all the functionality I'd desired? Well, sure -- who wouldn't? But since it sounds like a lot of folks are using Calibre to make their e-readers work the way they want them to (including Sony Readers, though I'm not sure about Kindle, since Kindle doesn't use ePubs), apparently Calibre was designed to make machines that didn't have that magical functionality suddenly work better. I'm pretty excited.

Now, that said, a quick comparison: I got copies of Rachel Vincent's (rkvincent) My Soul to Lose novella from two different places when it was being offered for free as a teaser into her YA series, "Soul Screamers." One came from B&N itself in the B&N format. One came in PDF. I thought I'd look at both on my nook and compare. In short, the B&N version is much prettier, though it has a much smaller cover image when you open it. The PDF version has the same page break issues I described earlier -- they're easy enough to read around, but the B&N format fills the whole screen, so each "page turn" is a new full-screen image. I can change the font in the B&N version (two font options, five size options). The B&N version then shows me how many "pages" (as in, full screens) I have until the end of the document. In my experimenting, this could vary between 114 and 130 pages. None of the pages were numbered uniquely, the way they are in a print book or a pdf. The pdf edition might take me two clicks to get through a page, but it does have both the Nook page count at the bottom (87 pages, with two turns keeping me on the same page) and the pdf/print page count at the top of each unique print page. This doesn't matter so much to me for reading-for-fun type books, but if I were using a book for a class? I'd probably make sure I downloaded, then side-loaded, a pdf version through an alternate e-book source so I'd be citing the same pages as everyone else. For the pretty factor, though, the B&N edition wins -- it's easier to adapt, and each page turn works as a unique page in the reading experience, even if it doesn't correspond to print.

At any rate, there's my long review. If I end up having more to say later, I'll mention it!

On a tangent, did anyone else see the iPad reviews today? Was anyone else shocked that they're not using e-ink for their e-book reader function? Maybe that's impossible if you also want to use the display for other things... but to me, the e-ink display is what makes e-readers superior to reading on a computer. I was pretty darn surprised that Apple hadn't embraced it.

And now, for some author pimpage. You guys know mdhenry, right? The guy who writes the Amanda Feral (aka Sex in the City + Zombies) novels? His third book is coming out in February, and in part due to the recession (and possibly in part due to the success of similar campaigns for network TV shows), he's sponsoring a "Save Amanda Feral" campaign. Click the banner below to find out more!

Wow, has it been that long?

Why yes, yes it has.

The holidays were fabulous around here -- lots of great time spent with family before the actual dates themselves and then lots of extra hours at work to cover the time I took off! We had some fun gaming in New York on the first with our characters from the 3.5 continuing Xen'drik Expeditions campaign (we couldn't just let it go when it stopped being an organized play game). Twostripe has ramped the karate schedule back up, and Bug is big enough in my belly now that I can feel her from the outside of my belly even when she's not moving. That, by the way, is wild. There's a little person in there! The editorial assistants are now eating grown up food ("We're not kittens any more, boss!"). And I've been copyediting, book reviewing, finishing up my Living Forgotten Realms Adventure (slot zeroes starting soon!), and doing reference writing -- my usual ridiculous pace of work. My big fun project for the weekend (besides crib shopping!) is creating a map of the kingdoms in Great Britain for the Viking Saga game. Since we're somewhere between 700 and 900-ish A.D., ambiguously, I have some great fun maps to play around with to help me decide. (New favorite resource: Anglo-Saxons.net.)

The other big news for the beginning of the year is that I've just gotten a Nook, and am in the testing phase to decide if I want to keep it. Much to my embarrassment (since I posted the assurances of a bookseller on several forums), the Nook does not, in fact, read .doc or .docx or .txt files, which was one of the primary convincing factors for getting it. (I had intended to use it primarily as a tool for 1) reading digital review books, and 2) keeping up with Substrate submissions.) The Nook does read pdfs natively, however, and there are plenty of free programs to convert files from Word to pdf. Next hurdle? It doesn't annotate pdfs yet (actually, it might -- there are differing reports from users on this, and I need to play around with it more; B&N just says it doesn't support the feature as yet). That's a hurdle for me, since I want to be able to annotate Substrate pieces to remember what my thoughts were while reading -- and want to be able to have other people do the same for me. (Twostripe has not yet given much response to my thought that he could, perhaps, read drafts of my manuscripts more easily on an e-book reader this way; he is a print guy.)

The reading function, however, works beautifully. I've had an overdue review for Flames Rising since, what, August? The book came to me as an e-book, and despite reading the first twenty-odd pages on my computer screen, and then printing it out to three-ring-binder in hopes that I'd actually read it in print, I hadn't managed to actually read the thing. With an e-reader, though the formatting is still a little wonky (the pages are about a screen-and-a-half, so every other "page-turn" is only a small portion of the screen), it's been a much easier read to digest. It's a short story anthology, and in the last two days, I've read the various introductions (there are three -- two nonfiction and one fictional) and three short stories (including the first actual fiction I've ready by Cherie Priest of Team Seattle, who I've been meaning to read for ages), which amounts to nearly a third of the book.

The Nook is easy to use, loads fast enough that I don't feel like I'm waiting, has decent wallpaper installed for when you put it to sleep (they recommend never turning it off), and seems like a pretty straightforward device. I'm enjoying the e-book reading experience far more here than either on computer screen or printed from a three ring binder, so it's a major coup in that regard (though whether it's better than any other e-book reader, I couldn't say). Since reading e-books for review was half of the point of buying it, I'm satisfied on that score. I'm still playing with the annotation function to see if I can make it work for the rest of what I need it for -- which will impact my final decision on whether I remain an e-book reader owner, wait for a model that does everything I want it to (the Kindle has a lot of the functionality I'm looking for, but doesn't natively read ePubs, and the conversion process for that sounds like a bigger hassle than .doc to pdf), or decide to purchase another of the devices on the market (despite what their flaws might be). In the mean time, I'm having a fun reading experience and generally enjoying using it, so I have no doubt I'll be an e-book reader owner in the future, if I don't end up keeping my Nook this time around.