Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Happy New Year! It's been some time since I posted; it was a busy year at Casa Abbott for non-writing reasons. We've welcomed baby Fish into our family, joining his sister Bug, Three-stripe, cats Jack and Tollers, and I as members of our household. But while I'm behind on many things, I've continued to read a lot! Since I posted last year and the year before about my reading goals, I wanted to post last year's results and this year's goals before 2015 progressed too far!

This year, I did not count all the picture books I read, but I did count all my review picture books individually. For the year, I totalled 163 books, which is up from last year's 129 (probably in part due to counting all the review books individually). There was a method to my madness, however: I wanted to see what percentage of titles were review books as compared to non-review books. Here's some of the interesting breakdown:

• 89 titles were review books


• 106 were children's or YA books


• Only 12 were graphic novels, which is rather low


• I read 7 romance, 69 SFF, and 2 nonfiction

I did reasonably well on my goals. The 2 nonfiction titles beat my goal to read just 1. I read 13 out of the 15 novels from my TBR pile I'd hoped to read, 4 titles by autobio writers, 6 rereads (out of a goal of 3), and read one non-genre novel.

The most interesting statistic I kept last year was print vs. digital. I surprised myself by reading 91 books in paper and 72 digitally. I thought I skewed toward e-books, so it's interesting to me that I'm not even at 50% digital reading. Some of this is due to reading for the MFAs. I rely heavily on the library to provide me with MFA reading, and though some are available as e-books, most are more readily available in print.


Highlights of the year?

• Rereading Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead--and seeing it make the MFA finalists list--was great fun. It's been especially fun to read more of the Craft books, both post-publishing and in mss format, in combination with playing Max's Craftverse game Choice of the Deathless. Without the books being required for the game and vice versa, they work so well in conjunction!


• Finishing Devon Monk's "Allie Beckstrom" series was bittersweet, but starting the "House Immortal" books makes me confident there's more excellent reading to come.


• I had the fantastic opportunity to interview Gene Luen Yang for the autobio project, and I read The Shadow Hero and Boxers and Saints in preparation for that. They were both some of my favorite reading for the year, for very different reasons. I'd recommend The Shadow Hero to anyone, but especially readers who have a fondness for Golden Age superheroes. Boxers and Saints is a fabulous moral and ethical investigation of a historical period with a lot of magical realism thrown in, and I found it both enjoyable and tremendously moving.


• The biggest surprise read was probably Eleven by Tom Rogers. It's a book about 9/11, mostly from the perspective of a boy who's just turned 11, and it's fantastic both as an exploration of the event through fiction for middle graders and as a coming of age story. It was also pretty wild to realize that 9/11 happened before the middle grade age group was born--so it qualifies, on some level, as historical fiction.


• I'd also recommend without reservation the Super Lexi middle grade books by Emma Lesko. Lexi is neurologically and developmentally different from her peers, which makes her a fascinating POV character, and Lesko's commitment to neuro-diversity in children's books shows in how beautifully she captures Lexi and makes her so easy to empathize with.


• I loved finally finishing Shanna Swendson's "Enchanted, Inc." series, which for ages looked like it wouldn't get to continue beyond book four. (I'd still read more books in that world!)


• I'm also really eager to see where the "Kate Daniels" (Ilona Andrews) and "Safehold" (David Weber) books end up next!

There were, of course, a lot of other great books, but listing them all would be fodder for TLDR (if I haven't already hit that point).

I was pretty happy with this year's goals, so I'm planning to keep them the same. Here's to another year of good reading!

This has been a big week for e-book news, most of it coming from the old price-fixing suit (discussed here and here) about the agency model is now down to Apple. According to Andrew Albanese at PW, "Penguin Finally Settles Price-Fixing Charges, Will Avoid Trial." Apparently, since Penguin was the largest publisher involved in the suit, their settlement means that consumers who bought e-books under the agency model (like me!) will be receiving a bigger class settlement than anticipated: "With the Penguin deal, the settlement fund that will reimburse consumers has now more than doubled since the initial state settlement was announced in 2012."

Meanwhile, Apple is still holding to the position that they didn't do anything illegal, despite Judge Cote (the judge on the case) saying her initial reaction was that the government would be able to prove them guilty. (Albanese also covered this news in PW.) It does not look like it's going to be an easy battle for Apple, especially now that they'll be standing alone on the defendant's stand.

In other news, Apple is doing something I think is remarkably cool: they have started a publishing program for fan fiction in which both the fan fiction writers and the creators of the work on which the fan fiction is based will receive royalties for purchases. Fan authors can only work in certain licensed properties, which should remove legal issues, since it means that the original creators have to agree to let fans play in their worlds. Now, why would people buy fan fiction instead of just getting it for free on the web? I'm not sure. I don't read much fan fiction anyway. But I like the idea of creating shared worlds that can profit everyone playing there, which, given my background in role playing games and role playing fiction, shouldn't be a surprise. You can read more in the PW article.



And last, given the rumors about Microsoft buying B&N out of the nook section of the company, as well as the rise in popularity of tablets as reading devices, I've been having some concerns that e-ink is going to vanish, which will make me very, very sad. But lo, Sony and E Ink Holdings have just come out with a new device with a flexible screen that looks pretty darn cool! I don't see myself buying one any time soon -- I like my nook Simple Touch -- but I'm really glad that E Ink Holdings is still in the game, and I hope that's a trend that continues. (Full article, once again, via PW.)

Discussion on yesterday's post has been fun -- I need to go reply -- and thus I wanted to follow up just a little bit with some thoughts on the currently-under-fire agency model. To begin: writer buddy Max Gladstone (you can preorder his book here) confirmed that ebook royalty percentage is higher, but that doesn't mean that the royalty payout is higher; there's much complicated math involved in that equation (as the series of emails in our thread has shown). That thread led me to cite a figure jeff_duntemann has offered before (once here in the comments on my blog) -- he estimates that ebooks cost half as much to produce as print books, and thus should cost consumers half as much. Based on the figures my writer friend was throwing out there, I wonder if this is truer for smaller publishers: big publishers have a lot more overhead, just by nature of having much larger staffing, needing a greater number of people supporting that staff, warehousing, etc., etc. Looking for Jeff's breakdown (which I did not find -- Jeff, if you're reading this and you've done a breakdown, we'd love to see it!), I stumbled on a few more recent entries of Jeff's defending the Agency Model.

You may have noticed that I've not had much to say in favor of the Agency Model, so that Jeff -- who has a better grasp of how the industry works than almost anyone I know -- was supporting it made me stop and take a look at his points. And here's what I discovered: I have been looking at the Agency Model issue first as a consumer, and second from the perspective of an e-book only retailer. As a consumer, it may not be super convenient for me to have to go poking around for different prices at different places, but if I bargain shop at several stores, I know I'm getting the best deal. I used to do that a lot pre-Agency Model. When the Agency Model came on the scene, I largely stopped shopping at Books on Board and Kobo Books, because most of the titles I'd been buying from them were now on the Agency Model, so I might as well buy them from Barnes and Noble and get them delivered wirelessly to my nook.



(I still shop at DriveThru Fiction, where my own books are sold, for a different niche of books. Fictionwise, Smashwords, and Bookview Cafe still had the kind of self-published stuff -- usually short stories or backlist titles from writers I knew had content there -- that they remained worth checking, but for different content than I'd purchase at B&N anyway.)

So, the Agency model drove me away from non-chain e-book retailers on the Web. It made it impossible for me to use coupons or to receive incentives from retailers -- something I've become accustomed to as a book buyer even at indie bricks and mortar stores over the years. Customer loyalty initiatives no longer worked for e-books for a large enough percentage of what I was buying that I quit shopping around.

Worse yet, the Agency Model didn't actually seem good for the publishers! My writer buddy reminded me of this post from Nathan Bransford from back in March 2011 about how Agency pricing works, which shows that publishers often make less money on Agency Model books. So it was looking to me like this: the consumer loses because the prices are higher and they get no incentives. The indie e-book retailers lose, because customers like me stop bothering to shop there. The publishers lose because they make less money per sale.

But hold the phone. Jeff (whose latest book, published by his publishing house, you can buy here) points out that the big publishers make less money per sale. Once you take out some of the risk factors (like print run size), publishers that publish e-books, either exclusively or as the majority of their business, have an incredible opportunity with the Agency Model. He writes: "An online ebook store’s capacity is essentially unlimited, and any number of publishers can play. If there are a million publishers and 999,900 of them sell products at lower prices than you do, your control of pricing is less than it was in the era when it was tough to get your books into stores and a relatively few large publishers dominated the market."

Scott Turow laments the potential loss of the Agency Model for its probable impact on bricks and mortar bookstores -- and it turns out that places like Barnes and Noble have done really well under the Agency Model, so even my preferred chain will be impacted if the DoJ does win the suit against Apple, Macmillan, and Penguin. So there are additional factors I'd not been considering in my previous assessment of the Agency Model.

As for now, however, I'm back to shopping around for good prices on ebooks. If you have a favorite indie ebook etailer I haven't mentioned already, I'm always up for a new place to price check!

If I used my blog like I use my history column on Branford Patch, I'd create a feature called the "E-book Minute," in which I'd post all the e-book news I've been collecting. Because there seems to be a lot of it these days!

But I'm far more free-form over here, so today's e-book minute will surely be something else the next time it comes around.

The exciting news: I get to shout "Yay Amazon!" Tentatively, of course. PW speculates that Amazon may be giving up its e-book format exclusivity in order to keep its publishing arm in bricks and mortar stores. This is a big hooray for me, if it happens, because that means writers who are releasing books only on Amazon, like writer friend Audrey Auden, are no longer inaccessible on my nook. If something is only available for e-book on Amazon, I would no longer be limited to computer reading or not reading it. I am hoping that Amazon will make the shift, and I suspect they might actually see their sales increase in e-books if they sell in a format that non-Kindle users can read. (Whether they'll see changes in sales of Kindles, however, I'm not sure.)

In other news, Random House has decided to charge 3x the normal going rate for e-books when selling them to libraries; the ALA has asked them to change the policy. PW's Peter Brantley wrote a pretty insightful blog entry on how this reflects the difference in perceived value between publishers and end-users, and what kind of impact that may have on publishing -- or on libraries -- or both.

Tangentially, Overdrive just purchased an Australian e-book company, which might get them access to more material, but definitely gives them access to some nifty new technology that may improve the library borrowing experience for patrons. So even if all Big Six publishers drop off the library scene (since Random House's pricing may make them impossible for libraries to work with), Overdrive is still working on ways to get books to readers.

Just a couple of links today. PW blogger Peter Brantley wrote up what I think is an excellent entry about the problem with leaving libraries out of the e-book revolution. Brantley's assessment is that by making e-books unavailable through libraries, a whole class of Americans is denied access to those resources. If the market does shift so that more and more books are published exclusively in electronic format, I agree that this is going to become the problem that Brantley anticipates. In the mean time, thank goodness for paper books, Interlibrary Loan, and the host of other resources available at the public library.


(The rotunda at James Blackstone Memorial Library, my local source for research and reading.)

Who's getting e-books right? According to Kent Anderson, Amazon is getting everything about publishing right, and everyone else in the book world needs to seriously up their game. This is, at least in part, true: writer friend of mine Audrey Auden dumped all the other e-book retailers for her self-published Realms Unreel because Amazon's customer service and platform were by far more beneficial to her in convenience and sales. On the other hand, Jim Hines recently discussed how Amazon can change your prices without your permission, as recently happened with his Goblin Tales. I maintain my wariness around Amazon, despite finally jumping on board with Amazon Prime (as it keeps us comfortably in diapers here at Casa Abbott).

A few interesting topics in the last week and change that are relevant to previous posts on this blog:

• The price fixing suit against Apple and the "Agency 5" has been amended so that it doesn't include Amazon (it surprised me that Amazon had initially been included, since they've never been pro Agency Model) and Random House. PW covers it here.


• Verso Digital conducted a survey (also covered in PW) that shows book buyer preferences for a mixed digital and print market -- so print is likely to remain around for awhile.


• Of course, according to Andre Tartar of Vulture, that will only be true so long as Barnes and Noble stays in business He views them as the last hope for print books reaching the public. The comments on the article are at least as interesting as the article itself.



• And last but not least, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy address the complaint by Fox News that their movie promotes a dangerous liberal agenda in an interview with UK based Leicester Square TV. There are several other amusing clips from the interview on Leicester Square's YouTube channel as well.

A couple of interesting bits of knowledge about digital publishing came to my attention recently, both first via PW, but their link to the B&N/nook divide didn't work, so you get a TechCrunch column (via John Andrews) instead.

Here's the deal with B&N/nook: according to John Biggs at TechCrunch, the company has announced that they're considering spinning off nook as a separate company. What strikes me about this is that it's really not a new strategy for B&N to split off branches of the company into their own separate companies. B&N, B&N.com, and B&N College were all, at one point, separate companies. I want to say that the college stores are now back under B&N proper, but I'm not sure if B&N.com is operating as a separate company or not. Functionally, as far as the user is concerned, they're all the same, and they certainly share customer information among the companies. So it wouldn't surprise me if nook splits off for now, and as B&N figures out where it's going in the marketplace, it may recombine again in the future. That seems to be how B&N typically works over the long haul.

Now, granted, whether they can compete long term with Amazon and Apple, who knows? I hope so, because, well, you all know my customer loyalty bias. I do think it's too bad that the nook Simple Touch isn't doing better, since it's a pretty great little device -- there are some things that my nook First Edition did better, but the Simple Touch has some excellent features, and the hyperlinking works very well (for books that are formatted properly for the device; as always, some formats work better than others).

The industry is changing, and according to Hyperion CEO Ellen Archer, in a Digital Book World interview with Jeremy Greenfield, it's not just digital that's making the impact, but media arms. Archer is the publisher behind the Richard Castle novels (with Tom Straw writing as the fictional Castle); the most recent Nikki Heat mystery came in at #1 on a bestseller list (she doesn't mention which one), and she notes that another media tie-in also hit the #1 spot. Since Disney is the parent company to Hyperion, and ABC is the parent company to Disney, Hyperion has a lot of connections in that world, and Archer is projecting that as the future.

All that said, I think we've still got a long ways to go before the market for paper books burns out. (Pun intended.) There really is still an experiential quality there -- and there are still plenty of people who aren't willing to have a devoted digital reading device and hate staring at the computer screen when they're relaxing. Granted, that number grows smaller... but the market is still there.

Although, if it's true that the market for consumer goods is driven by fourteen year olds, the industry shift may come a lot sooner than I anticipate.

*Yes, the quote is from Leverage. Because that show is awesome.

When Amazon first said that the Kindle was going to work with Overdrive back in April, I was excited. As a former library staffer, I thought this could only be a win for library users and libraries in general. Good for libraries how, you say? Circulation statistics help libraries get funding, whether those circs are from print books or e-books. More circs = better library statistics = better chance for grants. So, hurrah Amazon for helping libraries out!

But wait. As of last week, Penguin just pulled all their new books from Overdrive. Why? Apparently the new Kindle/Overdrive platform has increased concerns about security for their digital files. Apparently if you want to borrow a book for your Kindle, your library directs you to Amazon's site, rather than to the Overdrive program (and Adobe Digital Editions), which is how I've always used Overdrive. (This is conjecture on my part, based on news coverage.) According to a recent article in PW, libraries may end up on the losing end of this disagreement, since now only one of the Big Six publishers (Random House) is fully on board with library lending. And they're taking a look at their policy, so who knows, what that will mean for the future?

I hate to sound like I'm always coming down on Amazon. As a resource, I love Amazon. I use them heavily for publication dates and information, and I shop there for all sorts of non-book items. I rent digital-streaming movies from Amazon. I buy music there. I really want Amazon to be the kind of company that I want to shop at. And I don't think that the traditional publishers are automatically in the right. But it seems like there are just too many hijinks where Amazon is concerned to automatically assume that Amazon is the good guy.

Especially, it seems, for independent publishers in international circles. I forget where this link came from (possibly also the PW newsletter), but Mark from The Writer's Guide to E-Publishing breaks down what your book actually costs on Amazon if you're selling it abroad. If you've priced it for free -- or at 99 cents -- that's not what folks in Europe are going to end up paying (and remember, they've got the exchange rate in their favor).

Some day I want to open up the PW newsletter and find some really awesome, feel-good, heart-warming Amazon related news. But I'm not holding my breath.

I am down to 33 messages in my inbox. This is the closest I've been to "success" since the end of September. I'm getting there! This means that work is getting done on this end, for which I'm glad -- but more on that topic later. Now, to the important business of interesting links, so I can close some browser tabs...

• So, after I celebrated Amazon's cooperation with Overdrive as a success for library patrons (and library e-book circulation statistics), Amazon launched their own lending service for Prime members. The initial Publishers Weekly article gives some details, including how Amazon intended to launch without the Big Six publishers. PW blogger Peter Brantley followed up with his observations on the program, as well as the impact on libraries. Then yesterday, PW's Rachel Deahl reported that Amazon might be headed toward litigation, since they had apparently planned to lend books they didn't really have permission to lend. Additionally, agents are in an uproar because, although Amazon will pay publishers for books as a sale, the borrowed books will register differently from traditionally sold titles, meaning that the royalties could get very messy. I am never surprised at kerfuffles surrounding Amazon's business practices, and though I think the Kindle is a fantastic device (and I do rent, and occasionally purchase, streaming media from Amazon, at least so long as my free trial Prime membership lasts), every time a situation like this comes up, I'm glad I'm not further in bed with Amazon. Of course, if I eventually make the Redemption Trilogy available to Amazon customers, that relationship will inevitably change once again.


• Speaking of e-readers, friend of the blog and former college classmate of mine John Andrews of the Hippo posted a concise and helpful overview of the different options on the market right now, including the new updates about the B&N line and price cuts (which, of course, come within months of my purchasing a Nook SimpleTouch, now known as the regular Nook). You're all familiar with my B&N company loyalty, of course, and thus can take all my commentary on e-readers with a grain of salt; John has no such biases that I'm aware of, and is, you know, a journalist and stuff, so his commentary is much more trustworthy.



• The Muppets are coming soon! Tor.com very nicely linked to the last of the parody trailers for the film, which lampoons the first parody trailer and takes hits at the Twilight Saga. It makes me giggle. I'm so looking forward to it!


• DriveThruRPG is hosting Teach Your Kids to Game Week from November 14 through November 21. Bug's already got her first set of dice, and she loves our huge-sized minis, so I figure we're already well on the way to a future gamer.


• Jeffrey Taylor, another classmate of mine from Simon's Rock, is launching a new comic starting tomorrow. Clockworks Comics has its online launch party tomorrow -- you can check out more info on the facebook page.

And with that, I think my links are expended!

Like some large number of Americans (more than proportionate for any other week of the year), I'm celebrating a birthday this week! For me, birthdays are like New Year's Eve and New Year's Day: a time to look at what I've done that I'm proud of in the past year, and a chance to decide to improve on the things that need improving. So that's the type of thing I've been thinking about -- and hopefully, I'll be increasing my blog presence as one of those areas that needs improvement!

One of the big celebrations this week, however, is not personal but professional: my short story "Missing Molly" was just released in the anthology Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror! It's currently available as an e-book, and the print edition will be available in the near future. Expect to hear more about the anthology here on the blog as we're all getting ready for my favorite holiday (Halloween!).