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Since a number of people said I should go ahead and do it, I’ve created a Jim C. Hines Fan Page over on Facebook. I blame you all. # I found myself in several Internet squabbles last week. One started on Twitter after one of my #Amazonfail posts. In that case, the other person and I swapped e-mails, and that was the end of it. I don’t think we changed each other’s minds, but it gave me another perspective to think about, and I appreciate that. Another didn’t go so well. This was someone I know not to bother talking to in normal circumstances, but he was talking crap about a friend of mine, so I called him on it. The conversation went downhill from there. I eventually walked away, but I should have ended it much sooner.
But you can’t squash online stupid. So I’m trying to learn when to let it go. As a part of that lesson, I put together some questions to ask myself, to help me recognize when it’s time to stop.
From time to time, my karate sensei talks about bullies and insults. If someone tells you you’re ugly, you smile and say “Thank you very much,” then walk away. Because why should that person’s opinion have any power over you? They’re not the most important person in your life. The people who do matter, they’re the ones whose opinions I should care about. Not some online twit. Easier said than done. It feels almost unjust to allow someone to keep being wrong on the Internet. “That person is Wrong! We can’t let him get away with it!” I hate fighting. I’m not someone who takes pleasure is taunting or trashing another person online. But I believe some battles do need to be fought. I also think there’s a time when I’ve made my point and need to walk away. I just need to get better about recognizing that time.
In Doorways, Gil and Melissa and their son Noah are trying to make a living on their new farm, despite the strange, toxic water slowly encroaching onto their land. One of Jasper’s strengths is his characterization, making Melissa and Gil not shining fantasy heroes, but real people with real flaws. Their marriage is already strained following the stillbirth of their second child, and then Noah wanders into the forest and disappears while Gil was supposed to be watching him. Much as I wanted to see Gil and Melissa working together, that would be the easy route. The anger and fear between husband and wife as they each try to find their son was painfully real. As usual, Jasper’s cast of secondary characters were equally engaging, with their own flaws and hidden motives and conflicts. Five-year-old Noah, on the other hand, never quite clicked for me. It felt like Jasper was trying too hard to make him childlike, uses words like “kest” for quest, and following logid that didn’t quite ring true. It felt like an adult trying to write a child instead of a real child, if that makes sense. I liked the surreal Undercity, the nightmarish fairy tale world beneath the forest. It’s disturbing as heck, treading that dark fantasy line between the fantastic and the horrific. But I didn’t feel like I was seeing or learning enough about the Undercity to understand it. For much of the book, it’s a vague danger. I don’t understand how things work or what’s really at risk. Eventually, we discover what’s going on in the Undercity — the power struggle, the reason the poisons are leaking out into the world above, and so on. But I wanted to get more of that sooner. Not the whole picture, perhaps, but I needed more to ground me in this world and make it real for me. You can find more about the book at Jasper’s web site, or read a longer excerpt at BSCReview. I’m not a big dark fantasy reader, and I suspect fans of that genre would enjoy the book. If you’re less into the dark side of the genre, I’d probably steer you toward The Wannoshay Cycle first. Jasper’s a good writer; I just don’t know if I was the right audience for Doorways.
As noted before, we had to switch artists in mid-series. This was done by Mel Grant (who also did my goblin covers). The cover for Mermaid remains my favorite, but I think he did a great job making sure it was recognizable and consistent with the earlier books. # I also asked yesterday whether an anime-style Snoopy fighting cat ninjas would be awesome or terrifying. socchan took up the challenge, and the answer is: Awesome!!! # Page proofs for Red Hood have also arrived. I know how I’ll be spending my evenings for the next few weeks. (But this means I should be able to post a sample chapter from the book soon!) # Thank you to everyone who suggested titles for book four. After talking to my editor, the final title will be: The Snow Queen’s Shadow The Snow Queen’s Snare was a close runner-up, but didn’t quite fit the plot as well. Shadow was suggested almost simultaneously by two users on LJ and my jimchines.com blog, so I’ve decided to name them both winners. Congrats to miladygrey and Sewicked. I’ll be e-mailing you about your prizes! # Finally, because I haven’t done one in a little while, a LEGO piano by catarino. I used to play piano, and I love the detail on this thing. Check this closeup of the keys, or just click the image below for more shots of the piano and catarino’s other work.
I don’t know how much e-books should cost. I’ve read arguments for sliding-scale prices. I know lots of people don’t want to pay over a certain price. I don’t have an answer. I don’t know whether Macmillan’s agency agreement would be better for authors and readers than some other approach. I don’t know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop. I don’t know whether people are going to love Snow Queen. I don’t know where I get my ideas. I don’t know when I’ll be able to post the cover art to Red Hood’s Revenge [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon]. I don’t know how long I have before my son stops running up to hug me when I come home from work. I don’t know if my home has adequate weaponry to protect my family against the zombie uprising. I don’t know whether I should set Snow Queen revisions aside for a week so I can write up and pitch a new series to DAW. I don’t know why “Single Ladies” won a Grammy. (But I think it had something to do with the Chipmunks movie.) I don’t know why I’m so incredibly bad with names and faces. I don’t know how Randall Munroe does it. I don’t know how single parents balance work, kids, and sanity. I don’t know why the catfish in our aquarium keep dying. I don’t know why religion is ever worth killing for. I don’t know if I should create a fan page on Facebook. I don’t know whether an anime-style Snoopy fighting cat-ninjas would be awesome or terrifying. ETA: socchan brings the awesome here. I don’t know where this post came from. I guess I just thought the Internet would be a slightly better place if people were willing to admit they didn’t know things from time to time. It’s a new month, which means new books to read! In a purely self-interested move, let’s start with the one that has my story in it. * A Girl’s Guide to Guns and Monsters [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] is … well, pretty much what it sounds like. Urban fantasy women, weapons, and monsters. Including my story “Heart of Ash,” also known as the werejaguar/dryad story. Anton Strout and Tanya Huff also have stories in this one. * Next up we have the mass market release of The Horsemen’s Gambit [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] by David B. Coe. This is the sequel to Coe’s book The Sorcerers’ Plague. As a Tor book, this one isn’t available from Amazon. Fortunately, Barnes & Noble, Mysterious Galaxy, and your local bookstores are all there to take up the slack! Read chapter one here. * Cherie Priest has a trade paperback release out this week, with Fathom [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon]. Another Tor book, and thus another contender for Sir Not Appearing at Amazon.com. Publishers Weekly describes it as, “A decidedly dark departure from Priest’s Eden Moore saga (Four and Twenty Blackbirds, etc.), this stand-alone novel is equal parts horror, contemporary fantasy and apocalyptic thriller.” * Mark Henry’s Happy Hour of the Damned [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] is out in mass market as well. From Mark’s site, “There’s a campaign sweeping the internets to save my zombie diva from obscurity … What it boils down to is, Amanda Feral’s getting one more shot before the series gets nixed. My publisher is reissuing Happy Hour of the Damned, the first book in the series, in mass-market paperback for the paltry sum of $6.99.” How can you refuse such a friendly-looking zombie? * I missed posting the release of Jennifer Estep’s book Spider’s Bite [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] last month because I suck. This is the first in Estep’s new urban fantasy series about an assassin named Gin. It’s an intense book, pulling no punches on the sex, violence, or darkness of Gin’s world. I liked that we had more openly fantasy elements in the urban setting. No vampires secretly living as mortals here; everything’s out in the open. My biggest nitpick was an aspect of Gin’s magic — I lost suspension of disbelief when she was able to use ice lockpicks. Estep is guest blogging and giving away a copy of the book at SciFiChick.com. * Finally, we have Michelle West’s latest novel, City of Night [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon]. This is the second book in her House War series, the sequel to The Hidden City. You can read the first chapter on West’s web site. I’m sure I’ve missed some, but this is already getting long and link-heavy. What else is out, and what have you been reading and enjoying lately?
I’ve been thinking about e-books a lot lately, for some reason. (Amazon still hasn’t restored Macmillan titles, last I checked.) In particular, there’s a debate in the SFWA Lounge about the shift from printed books to electronic. I think we’re in a very dynamic time. E-books are changing, and we’re waiting to see who’s going to be the dinosaurs and who’s going to follow the superior evolutionary path of the platypus. Will multipurpose devices (iPad, smartphones) do away with single-purpose readers (Kindle)? Will Cory Doctorow single-handedly throw DRM into the abyss forever? Will e-books approach 100% market share, doing away with all but a handful of print-on-demand artifacts? It occurred to me that there’s an element of privileged assumption going on with some of these predictions. I’ve had this conversation online with people who obviously have stable Internet access and a fairly high degree of tech-savviness. I also see it at conventions, where people whip out their Kindles and iPhones to compare features. The thing is, these are luxuries. If you’re in a financial position to afford the latest toys, great. But to project near-100% dominance of electronic books assumes that either the reading devices will drop to a price where all readers can afford them, or that if you’re poor, you simply won’t/don’t read. Tobias Buckell jokingly called for a boycott of Kindles until they bring the price down below $99. (He’s trying to break Amazon’s “monopoly” on the Kindle.) But even $99 is a lot of money, and not everyone is in a position to invest that much extra money every few years (because the technology keeps advancing) in their reading. I do think e-books are going to be a larger part of the market. We’ve seen cellphone novels take off in other countries. E-books make tremendous sense for certain markets — universities, for example. And the technology keeps advancing. But I don’t think you can assume everyone is going to switch to electronic books any more than you can assume everyone is going to get flat screen plasma TVs. Printed books are relatively cheap. $7-8 for a new mass market paperback. A buck or less for a used one. I don’t see that going away any time soon. What do you think? 1. At 10:00 p.m. last night, I typed “THE END” on the first draft of Snow Queen. First draft is done!!! So, time to start reading and marking things up for rewrite #1. 2. HUGE thanks to everyone who suggested titles for Snow Queen. You had some wonderful ideas, and I’ve e-mailed my top picks as well as a few crowd favorites to my editor. I’ll let you know what I hear back. 3. Catherine Shaffer believes I should be smothered with a pillow in my sleep for writing “The Creature in Your Neighborhood.” 4. The CEO of Macmillan explains their side of the Amazon incident: “This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon.” 4b. Charlie Stross and Tobias Buckell offer two good essays on Amazon’s move. 4c. I don’t think I could offer anything more articulate than what’s already out there. But I did want to point out that my previous post has already generated one angry comment which reads, “will not be buy macmillan books. it is ridiculous to pay such a big price for virtual books. will look for other authors.” Brilliant. Let’s punish the authors for something they have zero control over. But it’s a good reminder that most people are pretty ignorant about how the business works, and a lot of those people are going to see Amazon as some sort of hero standing up for cheap e-books. 4d. I was happy to find a short YouTube clip which I feel better captures Amazon’s attitude toward these negotiations. This is my first-ever attempt at embedding a YouTube clip, so my apologies if I mess it up. So the writerly block of the Internet is up in arms after all of publisher Macmillan’s books (including major SF/F publisher Tor) vanished from Amazon. According to a blogger at the New York Times: I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter. Neither Amazon nor Macmillan has weighed in on this yet, as far as I can find. But we’re pretty sure Amazon pulled the books. Unless Macmillan pulled them. But it was probably Amazon. We think. At least according to that single unnamed source in the NY Times blog…. The timing does seem highly suspicious. It happened on a Friday, when companies would be slow to react, and right after the Apple iPad news (which also impacts the e-book wars). And regardless of what happened, this sucks for a lot of writers, including many of my friends at Tor. But despite all of the angry speculation, I don’t know what happened. Once I have a little more information, I’ll happily join in the condemnations. If Amazon pulled the books, then shame on them. If Macmillan did it, then … well, WTF, Macmillan? If it was a database glitch1, a lot will depend on how fast Amazon fixes it and how quickly they apologize. For now, I’m just going to say this looks bad, and I expect to see more info very soon. ETA: That was quicker than I expected. From the CEO of Macmillan: “This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon.” Click for the full article. Thanks to Laura Anne Gilman for the update. —
Following up on yesterday’s post, for anyone interested in publishing industry numbers, one of my readers provided a link to Bowker’s 2009 industry statistics. This doesn’t provide numbers sold, but does show the number of new books in various categories. Worth a look, for anyone interested in this stuff. # So the princess series is going to be four books long. Three of these books have titles: The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] Book four doesn’t have a final title, and I’m almost out of time. We’re doing page proofs on Red Hood soon, and I want to make sure it includes information number four. So I’m turning to y’all for help. The final book is based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale The Snow Queen, as most of you already know. I need a title that will fit with the rest of the series, and will be so exciting, so vivid, that everyone is helpless to resist its allure. At the moment, the tentative title is Spell of the Snow Queen. It works, but my editor and I would love to find something that had a little more zing. Rejected titles include: Shards of the Snow Queen All suggestions are welcome. If we end up using yours, you’ll receive an autographed book and a shout-out in the acknowledgements. Yesterday, Victoria Strauss tweeted a link to The Ugly Truth About Getting Your Book Published, in which Phil Cooke is just the latest voice to proclaim the Awful Truth about Publishing. The article flaunts various numbers to show that book sales are PLUMMETTING, and everything is AWFUL! (He also includes strategies for dealing with these awful truths. Coincidentally, Cooke runs Cooke Pictures, a media/publicity consulting company who will happily help you survive this terrible storm … for a fee.) (ETA: Phil Cooke commented to say that he does not, in fact, charge a fee for his services. And then follows up with a sockpuppet. Sigh…) For example, “Bowker reports that 560,626 new books were published in the U.S. in 2008, which is more than double the number of new books published five years earlier (2003) in the U.S. These figures include print-on-demand and short-run books, which is where most of the growth has occurred.“ (Emphasis added.) And then, from point number three, “Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast.” Ladies and gentlemen, we have MathFail. Let me break it down with simple and totally made-up numbers. Let’s say a decade ago, 1000 different books were published, and each book sold an average of 10,000 copies. 1000 x 10,000 means 10,000,000 books sold overall. Then print-on-demand technology leads to an explosion of self-publishing and vanity presses. Ten years later, we have twice as many books being published. But the average PoD title sells what, 100 copies? Let’s be generous and call it 200. Assuming no change at all in traditionally published1 books, we see: 1000 x 10,000 = 10,000,000 traditionally published books. Oh noes! Average book sales have been cut almost in half! It’s the end of publishing … even though, in our made-up example, traditionally published books are selling just as well as they did a decade ago. If you want to educate me, show me useful data. Be specific. Don’t just flash around misleading and utterly useless generalizations. Want another example? “A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore.” MathFail Redux. If you sell a book to Tor or Baen or DAW, you have an extremely good chance of having your book stocked in an average bookstore. “Sell” to Publish America, and your chances are closer to 0%. But lump everything together, and you can get your average to be nice, scary, and utterly meaningless. “Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies.” And how many of those titles are out of print? Specialty books? Vanity Press? It’s true that publishing is in a rough place right now. Print runs really are down, overall … but not necessarily to the extent implied in Cooke’s article. Things are changing, and we’re working to keep up and adapt. It’s not the end of print, the end of publishing, or the end of the world. —
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Copyright © 2010 Jim C. Hines - All Rights Reserved |
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A little while back I received a review copy of A Gathering of Doorways 
