Resist the SERVANT marshmellow

ByJohn Brown

Folks, please resist the SERVANT marshmellow.

Me and my big mouth. I unwisely let it slip in a comment thread that I had Servant up on Amazon (it’s up early because I need at least 24 hours to make sure my purchase gets the ratings going and to make sure everything looks right). And some of you have gone out to purchase it, for which I love you, BUT I should have made clear that we’re still in the proof check phase. That means we’re carefully going over the beta version of the trade paper book and catching the errors you only see when it’s in book form (next time I’ll do the trade paper first and then the ebook). You might not notice the things we’re catching and will be happy with the proof version. But I hate thinking you’re getting anything but the best.

If you’ve already purchased and don’t care, fine. If you do, Amazon has a liberal return policy. For the rest of you: DON’T EAT THE MARSHMELLOW. Give us just a few days. Make sure you’ve signed up for the new book release notification on the left. I’ll let you know when everything is ready to go AND on sale 🙂

Happy holidays!

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  • Amazon vs. Macmillan–hey, wait, you pulled my book!

    ByJohn Brown

    I loved Amazon since the first day we met. But Amazon just sucker punched me, pulling my book from its shelves last Friday. As well as those of thousands of other authors. Why, Santa, why?

    Cash, Johnny. Power. Is it ever about anything else?

    Well, sometimes it’s about cookies, Santa. But money and capitalism are good things.

    Yes, they are, Johnny. And fights are exciting, especially the ones where the one guy cleans the other’s clock, folding his nose over, and the blood spatters everywhere, and his eye swells up like some pig’s eye, and the teeth, the TEETH! It makes you want to pop an elf’s yammering happy singing head off with your thumb and forefinger, stomp his body into oblivion. Ah! Little shooting parties, elves lined up in a row, elf guts (pant) elf blood (pant) power (pant) BBQ roasted elf heads (pant) and Rocky theme music.

    Mommy, Santa looks weird.

    ***

    So, here’s the deal. Listed below are the “big six” publishers in North America, accounting for the lion’s share of sales and titles.

    • Hachette Book Group (owned by French company Hachette Livre)
    • HarperCollins
    • Macmillan
    • Penguin Group
    • Random House (subsidiary of media conglomerate, Bertelsmann)
    • Simon & Schuster

    Tor Books is an imprint of Macmillan. This means Macmillan is my daddy right now. We luvs Macmillan. Amazon, on the other hand, is a distributor. And we luvs them as well.

    But Amazon’s not just any distributor. Amazon wants to take over a bit more of the publishing supply chain in order to make more money. Macmillan said, “um, I don’t think so,” and the fight was on. Actually, I don’t think it was really so much of a fight as Amazon immediately going all North Korean Kim Jong-il on us. Despite what I think was poor strategy, it illustrates the real battle going on in the publishing world at the moment as the ebook and edistribution start to become a reality.

    Changing your business model to make more money is a very logical thing to do, and I have no problem with Amazon trying to do it. I’m not one of those Wal-Mart haters. I like cheap goods. And I like to see children in sweat shops. However, I do have some self-interest. And ultimately there are few situations where a monopoly is a good thing for the consumer.

    No, Amazon isn’t a monopoly now, but Hitler wasn’t always “Hitler” either. For his first 39 years he was Schicklgruber. But “Heil Schicklbruber” doesn’t induce people to rise up and slaughter nations. And so his Nazi PR sensibilities demanded he change it. No really, this is true. Anyway, this just proves that Amazon could start killing bunnies at any moment–don’t ever trust someone who names their company after a river. Or after Adolf Hitler, like if someone called themselves Hitler Lipstick or Hitler Toys.

    I’m not going to rehash the story on my blog because others have already done it so well. So read these.

    1. Scott Westerfield gives the full story and explains what happened.
    2. Charles Stross looks at why Amazon did this.
    3. Tobias Buckell delves into factors involved in pricing a book.
    4. John Scalzi explains why he thinks Amazon lost this round.

    What does this mean for you, dear reader? Well, for the interim, it means you’ll find new copies of SERVANT the cheapest at the select Smiths’ grocery stores out West that carry it. Furthermore, Barnes & Noble has always been an excellent book seller Let me recommend any internet purchasers use their site until Amazon decides to stop bullying publishers and authors.

    Beyond that, I don’t know, we’re only in round one. As for me, I tend to think the publishers have a more viable option with this agency model. But I’ll need to think on it more. In the meantime, enjoy the blood and bashing and the little authors screaming as they flee the building with their clothes on fire.

    Hey, wait, MY back IS ON FIRE!!! AAaaaaaahhhh!

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  • Awful Intent Cover Reveal

    ByJohn Brown

    For Awful Intent, I looked around at different cover design shops and decided to use Damonza. I sent over the brief, and we began. What I needed was a cover in the same style of Bad Penny. A match. I also told Grady, the designer, that if he did something new with Bad Penny, I might consider it.

    He sent back these.

    PennyB  Intent1

    Intent2  Intent3B

    I loved what he did with Bad Penny. But it was nowhere near what we’d done with the original. And none of the others matched either. And that was a problem. I need all of the covers in the series to look like siblings.

    We went back and forth with a number of iterations. Then decided to focus on Bad Penny.

    Penny2B  Penny6B

    Penny7  Penny8

    And then I realized that I was falling prey to shiny object syndrome. It’s the bane of my life. There were all sorts of great ways to approach the cover, but I had already spent hours sorting through all that with the Bad Penny original. And the cover must be doing okay, because we sold lots of copies last year. I decided for everyone’s sanity to stick with the original decisions and parameters. That meant:

    • Bold, action-thriller colors
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    • And some small element over top

    But I was still having a hard time clarifying in my mind something that was eluding me. Luckily I was in Cedar City for the Shakespeare Festival at the time and having lunch with Dixon and Linda Leavitt. Dixon pointed out that I was waffling between a literal and symbolic approach. Once he said that, I could see exactly what he meant. For example, the Bad Penny in the first batch was painted on a board. It was more realistic. The red Awful Intent was more symbolic. He also pointed out that I had used a small element in the original. With that clarity, we went back to work.

    I’m very pleased with the finals (BTW, I’ll be tweaking the text above my name in Awful Intent; so that one isn’t final-final yet).

    BadPennyAwfulIntentFinal

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  • Servant of a Dark God audio?

    ByJohn Brown

    I’ve recently received a number of emails from people asking if there is an audio version of Servant of a Dark God in the works and how can they get it. At this point, the audio rights have not yet sold. But that doesn’t mean those of you who would like audio have no recourse. The best thing to do is to make a request to Audible. It’s quite easy. Here’s what they say on their Contact Us page:

    Content Requests: If you’re interested in a particular author or title, please let us know about it by sending an email to:content-requests@audible.com.

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  • Curse Update: Copy Edits, 2 Books

    ByJohn Brown

    CurseV2FinalV1My copy editor just delivered the marked up manuscript. I will be making the edits over the next few days. Once those are made, it’s time to publish.

    Ah, but publish just one book?

    Nope. It looks like this is going to be two:

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    • RAVELER: The Dark God Book 3

    Each book would be about 120k words. Novels can range from around 30-50k words like many middle grade novels (or most of the books written by Louis L’Amour) to the 50-70k length of a lot of romance novels to the 70-100k words of many thrillers to the 300-400k epic behemoths that George R.R. Martin and Sanderson have recently written.  I think most adult novels are around 100k.  I think most fantasies are in the 80-130k area, although many epics can be in the 200’s.  The bottom line is that both volumes will be chock full of story.

    This is all part of a strategy to tell the same long, big story as originally planned, but do it in quicker chunks so that the series can become viable financially more quickly, but also so readers aren’t waiting so long between books.  I have tormented those who enjoyed book 1 and wanted more far too long. I want to remedy that in the future, and more frequent installments will allow me to do this. Getting these two volumes out will help set the expectation, I think.

    So a release of CURSE in July seems more than feasible. Then we’ll release RAVELER early August. Why August? Because we need to commission a new cover illustration. The soonest the artist can have it done would be August. Stay tuned. I can’t wait to see what art Victor comes up with next.

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    Happiness.

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  • |

    Free stories from Year’s Best Fantasy 9 anthology!

    ByJohn Brown

    Tor is posting ALL the stories in the Year’s Best Fantasy 9 anthology (published summer 2009) for FREE. Mine was in the second installment, but you can already get it here. What you want are all the others! For example, installment 3 has one of my favorite short stories I read last year: Kij Johnson’s “26 Monkeys and the Abyss.”

    Here’s how to get them.

    1. Go to the Tor.com site.
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  • Tomorrow’s ILA keynote speech time and location update

    ByJohn Brown

    Just wanted to update anyone planning on attending my keynote at the Idaho Library Association conference in Soda Springs–I had the wrong location and time. The correct location and time are below. See you there.

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    Friday, April 30th, 10 AM

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    250 E 200 S
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8 Comments

  1. I was not seriously troubled by any errors. I saw a few typos and superfluous words here and there, but not a lot. I’ve seen ebooks that are officially released that have a lot more errors than the current Servant ebook has.

    By the way, did you know that once you make revisions to an ebook, you can notify amazon and they will eventually send out notices to customers who have bought the ebook so they can get the updated version?

  2. Newbie Indie that I am, I did not know that. That’s excellent news, John. Thanks for letting me know.

    As for the errors, I’m glad to hear they didn’t bug you too much. They’re driving me nuts. Every time I find one, I start to believe more and more that some evil genie is sabotaging the document file when I go to bed.

  3. I can’t imagine it’s anything as bad as some of the books out there (especially the ones that are OCR’d without any editing whatsoever), but I appreciate the perfectionism 🙂

    Here’s a link to what JohnW was talking about:

    https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A1RGGPBKDR1BPZ

    Also Amazon have actually added an Automatic Book Update option in the Manage Your Kindle section of the Amazon Store, so people with that turned on would get the changes without having to do anything.

  5. I won’t turn on automatic book update, since it’s an open door for Amazon to retroactively delete purchased content. I also don’t want them quietly rewriting history. Han shot first.

    However, I will be buying your books (and ebook) during the book bomb, since boosting your career is very much in my best interest. The better your professional success, the more of your books I get to read.

    Thank you. In coming years I look forward to telling people “I started reading the Dark God series before it was a series” in the finest snobby fashion.

    Do you sign books that are sent to your PO Box with a SASE? Do you do cartoons?

  6. I certainly will sign a book sent with a SASE, and include my signature cartoon face.

    PO Box 157
    Laketown, UT 84038
    USA

    Some things I will not sign, like babies, since I did not author them.

  8. Ghosttie,

    Guaranteed. The post-proof ebook is already up and available. The paperback is approved and submitted. All we’re waiting for is for CreateSpace to automatically post the paper version to Amazon which should be done this week. As soon as it’s live, I will let everyone know. I will have a special early-bird price on the paper version that’s almost right at cost.

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