Message from MK: 2020 mythos antho.

MK sent me an email about doing a 2020 anthology. It's a theme antho -- he wants Lovecraftian mythos stories. Before 31-July-2020, ideally.

I created a page for it here on my blog, so you could see most of the info he wrote.

Links of interest...

Kameron Hurley: The Privilege to Publish; the Power to Persevere at Locus; also Spotlight on: David Pomerico, Editorial Director.

PW's March picks of last week.


Publishing's Big 6:  Who are they? from Scott Marlowe's blog in 2010.

Tobias Buckell's Together, let’s break the Amazon monopoly on Kindles! in 2010.  It isn't entirely what you think it is...  and Toby's piece shows his brilliance. [Context:  this is about the Macmillan-Amazon negotiations of 2010, and I've linked to Toby's blog there.]

He definitely demonstrates the weirdness of the original statement!

Amazonia, at it again.

Ah, Amazon.  Bullying is such a great way to get what you want... or is it?

Remember 2010 when Amazon decided to bulldoze Macmillan?  No?

They're doing it to Hachette now.  So if you can't get your book by Stephen Colbert, for example, that's why.  Because Amazon thinks that keeping you from buying his book, and other Hachette authors' books, is a really clever negotiating tactic.

. @nkjemisin Given AMZNs near-monopoly position I think it's an anti-trust violation, but the US anti-trust regulators are broken.
— Charlie Stross (@cstross) May 9, 2014

Electric Velocipede 27.

Here are the mini-interviews from our final issue, EV 27.

TOC here (for both issues 26 and 27). 

Goodbye, Electric Velocipede.

Electric Velocipede and Icarus Closing

Electric Velocipede has a story in the Year's Best SF, 31st edition.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies blogged about our final issue.  Locus has a long review of EV 27, which includes spoilers for some pieces (I like to read my short fiction without knowing anything about it, myself, but YMMV, of course).

"I’m unhappy to bid goodbye to Electric Velocipede, of which we have the last issue here. A loss to the field." - Lois Tilton
— Electric Velocipede (@EV_Mag) December 27, 2013

You can buy issue 27 as an ebook for Kindle or Nook.  All the poems and stories were posted 30-January-2013.  [Will link to second post presently.]

"The Soviet Union needs beasts... Is a beast what you want to be?” http://t.co/d1Imh8TZMW @sentencebender in @EV_Mag
— Lara Elena Donnelly (@larazontally) December 30, 2013

Come to ConFusion next month (17-19 January 2014) and help us remember Electric Velocipede!  And if you're in NYC during February 2014, they're throwing a party too.  Huzzah to Matt and Sam!

Electric Velocipede (@EV_Mag) final issue release party, Feb 28th at Bluestockings Books. http://t.co/chnxMkUamU
— Matthew Kressel (@mattkressel) December 23, 2013

But we're having a wake in Michigan.

I am particularly proud of this as it was somewhat my idea, you see.  And I wanted John to enjoy ConFusion 2014; what better way than a party?  Celebration and farewell.  Come raise a glass with us -- there will be door prizes and raffles and STUFF.  Really!

I loved working on EV.  I'm proud to have been part of the team for 2008-2013.  I'm grateful for the others who became part of the team too -- for a little while or a long time, depending on their lives.

I'm thankful for them all, every one:  Adam, Patrick, Damien, Jamie; and all our slushreaders and proofreaders and support staff and... you.  Thank you.  It's been a wonderful ride on Electric Velocipede.

I'm so glad I got to hitch a ride.  With John and with all of you.

The Business Rusch: Submissions and agents. Also publishers...

Kristine Kathryn Rusch says:
August 13, 2012 at 12:17 pm 

All publishers accept submissions. They don’t dare not to. They have to look. (They don’t want to miss the next Harry Potter.) Check out Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, Killing The Sacred Cows of Publishing. Start with this one, but look at the TOC as well. Good luck!

Yes, this is from her 2012 post on The Business Rusch: The Agent Clause (Deal Breakers 2012).

Check it out if you're writing. In fact, read as much of The Business Rusch as possible. It will help you understand current publishing, the past of book publishing, and a great deal more. I cannot tell you enough; just go.

In fact, here's her latest, The Business Rusch: Unintended Consequences. Her blog posts on Thursdays.

Ebooks, libraries, and... ebooks' Netflix?

The Netflix for books is here, it’s mobile, and it makes Amazon look old

Now that's something interesting!

Alas, only for iThings thus far.  But it's new.  Give it time.  I hope it sticks around.


Cory Doctorow: Libraries and E-books

I really recommend reading Cory's posts over at Locus.  This one in particular, since it's about ebooks, and how the publishers need to work WITH libraries.  They aren't the enemy.  Libraries are the friends of both publishers and readers.

If you want to know more about helping libraries here in the States, check out the ALA's Authors for Library Ebooks site.  If you read at all, have any favorite authors, do go look at that site, please!

Look for this badge and help authors and readers encourage publishers to help us all keep reading.

Three links...

We have always fought; challenging the women, cattle, and slaves narrative from SFWA.

Wes Chu's debut novel, The Lives of Tao, got reviewed at HuffPo.  I really enjoyed Tao myself -- lovely snark! -- and I'm glad that the sequel is coming out soon, btw.  8)

New Writers, eBook Publishers, and the Power to Negotiate from Whatever.


Food for thought.  How can you change the world?  Don't think you can?

Why not?

You might surprise yourself... far more than you can imagine.  Let yourself try.

Catching up: links.

I went to Penguicon over the weekend. Had fun. Went to a lot of panels, missed some I hoped to attend.

But cons are like that. You see someone, you get distracted, you know how it is. :)

And because I was looking at Tor.com before con, I got to mention Jo Walton's first style of book series to several people who quite liked it. :D


Some links I've been looking at today:

Stephen King, bless him, has said something I've been thinking lately [a lot] about Marie Antoinette (Stephen King: Tax Me...)

Amazon was deleting ebooks before Neal Stephenson's Reamde


This last comment at Writer Beware sums up my thoughts on the DOJ versus publishers & Apple case:

"A couple of take-aways for me. The individual with finite financial resources is not equipped to take the company with less finite resources to court. It is so sad and discouraging to see it come to this."

Previous link found through the importance of reversion clauses in book contracts.

Converting to ebook.

Lots of people have talked about making a book, book publishing, and making ebooks.  I like to reread some of my favorites on this:  Tobias Buckell, Charlie Stross, Cat Valente... I'm missing Kris Rusch here.


Let's talk about what happens to those old books, the back list.  Made way back in the day when computers weren't so common.  Yeah, those books. 

First, to create computer files, a small press might have Kinko's chop the spine off a paperback edition.  Then the loose pages get scanned. 

Second, someone goes through the file and fixes as many really egregious errors as possible.  Things they know the scanner screws up.  Like words the scanner didn't understand. 

A lot of what slips past then gets fixed during proofreading.

Back in 1989, when I worked for a research consortium, the scanner had two languages and whenever it got confused, it liked Greek best.  So I'd have to go through and fix every triangle starting a sentence and make it into a capital A.  (But I'd keep the Greek inside formulas.)  And so on.


After the book is scanned, then it goes to a proofreader.  She's going to compare the files to the original manuscript. 

I know because I've done this often. I watch for letters run together, or dropped off, for altered words and punctuation...

You might not think proofreading is important.  It is very important.  Say you loved Dune.  Every ebook version of Dune will want proofreading.  Because that book was definitely not written on a computer. 

Every time ANY book has to be converted into a file, it has got to be proofread.  Remember, spellcheckers don't notice altered words -- how could they? -- as long as it's a real word.

This is also why even though you might have books in print, those titles don't immediately become ebooks.  Ebook conversion isn't a magic process.  It takes time. [Read Toby's link at the top for details.]

Charlie sums it up:

"There is no topic in the publishing industry this decade that is the source of as many misconceptions, superstitions, lies, plausible untruths, and idiocies as ebooks."

Postscript:  I don't understand readers who think "it's not physical" means it must be cheaper.  They pay for cellphones and cable.  They can look at their devices that provide these services, but they pay for those services as if the Thing-in-hand equals the Service. 

2011: July links

Tweets from Marc Gascoigne:

RT @DonnaMHanson : RT @pyroriffic : Apex Publications has opened to unsolicited novel submissions! http://twurl.nl/xfilt3

RT @jwikert : Study: Over Half Of E-Book Shoppers Buy Directly From Author Or Publisher http://zite.to/l7rlab via @zite #toccon

RT @Liz_Hand : Mike Dirda on ditching the bestseller lists for — OMG, actually READING NEW WRITERS???? http://t.co/628K2cb

Tweet from John Ottinger III: GW: SFFWRTCHT: A Chat With Editor Michael Ray of RedstoneSF magazine http://bit.ly/j7PkdN #scifi #fantasy

Five other Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chats are listed at the bottom of John's page. :]

Interesting how pastes from LinkedIn work... enough harvesting for now.

OT: A set of links about Facebook for principals. I'll have to go back to those myself.

Crippling libraries

I'm outraged about a particular publisher deciding to punish libraries who have e-books.

Full disclosure: I don't read e-books. I may someday, but I haven't tried 'em yet.


Imagine how you'd feel if you were the 27th person who lived somewhere rural, far away from a good bookstore, whatever -- and wanted to read something that you couldn't buy this month. And the library's only allowed to "rent"/lend the e-book 26 times.

Myself, I'm awaiting a status change on Charlie Stross's new Laundry book and Patricia McKillip's latest; they're both still new and can't be requested from other libraries.

With Lois Bujold's Cryoburn, I waited until the print book was off the new book shelf and could be requested. I have checked out hundreds of library books all my life, and that's a conservative guess. Last year alone I went through most of the Ellery Queen series [about 50 books] in 2-3 months.

More from a librarian about this madness. She provides lots of details, including contact info for HarperCollins and Overdrive.

The Analog Divide also has links for Trashy Bitches and Library Journal on this, along with Neilhimself's thoughts.


And another thing; what about the re-readers? I read my favorite books over and over. I honestly couldn't tell you how many times I've read the Miles Vorkosigan books. If I owned an e-book and it had a limit on how many times I could read it, and would expire out of my library...! What if I snagged a library e-book because it rocked and wasn't available in print format -- and that meant that someone else never got to read it?

Retiring or replacing a worn-out print book is NOT like limiting how many times an e-book is accessed!


Thanks to Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing and Lee Harris for tweeting the news. Also, there are a lot of great links and thoughts by commenters at BoingBoing.

I think that people who want the libraries to have more money ought to think about donating to them instead... because we moved away from the subscription-lending libraries quite some time ago.

Ereader use.

Maybe you heard all the ruckus back in February 2011 when the publishers all decided that library ebooks should be limited. It was a BIG ruckus. Or, as Literary Sluts put it: Congratulations HarperCollins – you just guaranteed Amazon and Kindle will win the eBook & eReader war

That's a good precis.

I bring it up because I bought Dad a Nook, and my sister-in-law got my brother a Kindle Fire. I won't use the Kindle app on my Galaxy Tab 10.1. I've added the Nook app instead. (More on this anon.)

I like Amazon's convenience, I do. But their business practices are horrible; just consider last month. Despite a long-held belief that the market is always right, it's really not. Businesses are not built to be kind, they are built to seek profit. Playing well with others is a social concept devised by humans. Corporations are not people, they are constructs made by people for a purpose.

Monopolies make for bad business practices: On eating your seed corn.

Part of why it all makes me angry is that libraries -- libraries! -- are suffering.

The economy worldwide is doing poorly, and the people who buy the most books read like the dickens. Of course we use library books. If I bought one new book a week, I still wouldn't have enough to read. I read far more than one book a week! I'm reading 2 nonfiction books [I finished The Gift of Fear a week ago], along with several fiction novels; before Christmas I'd wrapped up six novels. I finished three more by 4am yesterday.

I read a LOT.

I know I'm not the only one, since I got the seed corn link from this blogger. Except... I don't remember libraries ever limiting me to a few books (except my elementary school). I remember bringing home at least 10 or 12 in high school, which was just enough for about a week if I took it slow.

Literate people need books desperately. Publishers need new readers even more desperately. Thrusting readers back into the 1800s is the worst possible idea. We want to reach the future, our future, not fall backward into the past.

So think carefully about ebooks, oh corporations. Never eat your seed corn! How ever will it grow then??