Sillybean

Beginning WordPress 3 is here!

My book is out! I got my author’s copies over the weekend, and this morning a friend reported that her copy arrived in the mail. So, even though the official release date isn’t until Wednesday, it’s here!

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Publication delayed two weeks

Just got word from my editor last night: there’s a backlog at the printer, and as a result, my book will be out on the 30th rather than the 15th. Such is life!

[Tried to post this Friday evening from…

Amazon is not negotiating lower ebook prices for your benefit

On Friday, Amazon stopped selling Macmillan books, including Tor SF, Minotaur mysteries, and several other things I buy a lot. It’s a bullying move in a heated negotiation over how ebooks are sold.

Before you say, “Go…

Bloomsbury caught whitewashing, AGAIN

Seriously, you’d think they could have learned a lesson from last time, but no.

Kate Harding writes in Salon:

So really, publishers, if you’re so convinced that a book with a dark-skinned heroine won’t sell unless readers are

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Howdy, stranger.

I know, it’s been ages! How are you? You look thinner. Have you done something different with your hair?

Me? Well, I was sick for a while there. No, not hamthrax. Not even a virus, really; turns out the stuff…

Changing Publishing

Can we put Michael Tamblyn in charge of US publishing? All of it? Like, right now?

Some highlights from his presentation, 6 Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better:

DRM is the biggest problem with ebook readers. Not…

the greying of SF: not a myth

Over in a nice discussion of the generation gap in SF on Tor.com, a commenter crunches numbers on the ages of Hugo winners and comes up with a pretty clear trend. Really fascinating, assuming you care about this…

Translation from Aburt-speak to English of selected portions of his SFWA presidential platform[1]

Burt’s campaign posters

cf. Dr. Andrew Burt for SFWA President. See also A Gut Check Moment for SFWA.

Greetings

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RWA National and SF cons, compare and contrast

After eleven years of SF conventions, RWA National was … different. Convention neepery follows; run away now if you don’t care about this sort of thing.

For starters, I’m more or less used to being in the minority at…

Breaking news: publishers’ math “fuzzy.” Film at 11.

The current issue of Entertainment Weekly has an amusing story about the court case between Clive Cussler and the studio who made Sahara. Here’s the part that made me fall out of my chair (emphasis mine):

More pointedly, though,

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Writing progress

Courtesy of my drug-resistent insomnia: “Backtalk,” 650 words. Almost done. (Yes, very short.) I couldn’t quite think of an ending, but hey, it was four in the morning.

…yeah, the 4 a.m. dribblings of my sleepless mind are not what…

Attention, publishers

This is what you should be doing with your websites.

None of that takes a huge budget, really, but it does take a dedicated webmaster and not the last dregs of “spare time” contributed by already-overworked editors.

News bytes

My sidelink gizmo is borked thanks to the WordPress upgrade, so here’s a handful:

• Joss Whedon and John Cassaday are going to do another year of X-Men (whoop!)
• There’s a Martian sea
• Charlie Stross expounds on cold-bloodedly designing a

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PA and Atlanta Nights

Atlanta Nights is the hottest book going at the moment.

What the hell is Atlanta Nights?

It’s a book (I use the term loosely) written by a cadre of SF writers in order to prove that Publish America…

Children, play nice…

We have visitors from Neil Gaiman’s blog with us today.

Update: excellent advice on agent-getting strategy.