books-n-giggles

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9/14 Book Deals

Good morning and happy Monday, everyone! I hope you’re all having a great morning. :) Well, I’m not sure how “good” it is for those who are being affected by the fires, but I really hope this week can bring some improvements. Air quality is still bad, and so many people are being displaced by the fires. :/ I don’t know as much about Oregon weather, but I know it’s supposed to be a tiny bit cooler this week, so hopefully that helps. 

There are some great books on sale at least to help keep our anxiety down? Be sure to have a look if you need some new reading material. I’ve heard so many great things about Dear Martin! The first two books of the Waking Gods trilogy are also on sale, so if you’ve been wanting to get into those it seems like a good chance maybe! Anyway, hope you all have a wonderful day and happy reading!

Here is the link to find resources on how you can help out with the BLM movement! Keep the momentum going!

Today’s Deals:

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel - https://amzn.to/2ZBcUu9

Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel - https://amzn.to/2ZBVBJh

Dear Martin by Nic Stone - https://amzn.to/3bVoe9c

Stepsister by Jennifer Donnelly - https://amzn.to/2RrVawy

Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames -  https://amzn.to/33wcnum

The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir - https://amzn.to/3bXDUsL

Tell Me Who We Were by Kate McQuade - https://amzn.to/2Fx525I

The Color of Air by Gail Tsukiyama - https://amzn.to/3ixQRM4

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson - https://amzn.to/2FF7qHl

Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine - https://amzn.to/33y7266

Song of the Risen God by S.A. Salvatore - https://amzn.to/3huD3kb

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh - https://amzn.to/3huEwar

Captains and the Kings by Taylor Caldwell - https://amzn.to/2FrmN6E

The Bright Side of Going Dark by Kelly Harms - https://amzn.to/35FMgEh

NOTE:  I am categorizing these book deals posts under the tag #bookdeals, so if you don’t want to see them then just block that tag and you should be good. I am an Amazon affiliate in addition to a Book Depository affiliate and will receive a small (but very much needed!)  commission on any purchase made through these links.

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Sevro:

Darrow, Victra, and the Howlers:

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Honestly the least realistic part about the Magic School Bus is that a public school has a class size of 8.

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When someone approaches my meticulously organized bookshelves:

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Oh you sweet summer child. This was three years ago.

THE THORN OF EMBERLAIN

September it is. Mark your calendars, folks.

http://www.gollancz.co.uk/2016/05/an-update-on-the-thorn-of-emberlain/

I apologize for not being able to talk about this in detail sooner, but we had to nail down some specifics on both sides of the Atlantic before we could move forward. So, this is official: It’s not July. It’s September.

Why not July? Well, I literally do not have one free day in which to do promotional work, for one thing. I am moving! That’s right, in the middle of July, I am permanently moving cross-country, from the scenic fringes of Wisconsin to the hilly majesty of the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, where my beloved Elizabeth Bear and I have bought a house together.

If you’re wondering what the scale of the move is, it’s roughly 1300 miles.

So July isn’t great for me. 

Those of you going to GenCon or the World Science Fiction Convention in August will have a chance to see me, if you like. Those of you attending GollanczFest or FantasyCon in the UK in September will also have the chance. More specific tour dates and appearance info will be provided, as usual, as things clarify.

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Good tweet: Some ideas for ways to honour Ursula K LeGuin

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I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house. 

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well. 

It is only about two statements that I saw go by: 

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing. 

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously. 

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers. 

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half. 

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing. 

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy. 

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought. 

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out. 

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

That’s my long piracy story. 

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I don't know about you, but I'm looking at Sarah J. Maas.

only in the realm of fanfiction is smirking every two words considered sexy and not an odd facial twitch

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Feeding my need for GB. Hiatus blues

What do you mean this isn’t actually how the falconer figured out the name thing

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Quote from Stephen King.

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OH MY DEAR GODS IS THIS IT? PLEASE LET THIS BE IT.

Hi Scott, I know you have been asked this a lot, but, could you give us an update on Thorn? It has been a while without news.

Expect a huge update at the end of this month.

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walking into a bookstore like:

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THORN'D

HELLO I AM A DESTITUTE LASHAIN VISCOUNT AND I NEED YOUR MERAGGIO DETAILS TO SECURE SOME FUNDS UNTIL I COME INTO MY TITLE

  MY NAME IS UNKNOWN ANONYMOUS AND I’M MOST DEFINITELY NOT AN AMBUSH

DID I TELL YOU ABOUT MY CONNECTIONS TO THE HOUSE OF BEL AUSTER IF NOT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THEM AND THE GREAT OPPORTUNITY TO INVEST IN A LOT OF REALLY GOOD ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES

  PLEASE CLICK HERE TO KNOW ALL ABOUT HOW I MADE A 300% PROFIT ON AUSTERSHALIN BRANDY! AMAZE YOUR PEERS IN NO TIME!

  YOUR DELIVERY SHOULD ARRIVE IN A FEW DAYS IF NOT PLEASE CONTACT US WITH ALL YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS AND ALSO YOUR KEY TO TUMBLEHOME INN AND DO NOT FORGET TO ATTACH YOUR SIGNET RING

  MARVELOUS! YOU ARE INDEED THE 1000th CUSTOMER! YOU HAVE WON A SUIT OF CHAIRS IN THE STYLE OF THE LATE THERIN FLOWERING!

HELLO BEAUTIFUL DOÑA I AM A MERANT OF TAL VERARR AND I SEE YOUR PORTRAIT AT LADY SALJESCA’S VERY NICE VESTIBLE IN HER AILAND AND YOU VERY BEAUTIFUL I FEEL WE HAVE A CONNEXION PLEASE SEND MONEY SO I CAN ACROSS THE SEAS TO YOU MY BELOVED ONES

(the idea was set to motion by lisapizza and all the actually clever and funny bits in this are by bakingforthedoctor – gods guys I love you you are so bad for my sleeping patterns xD)

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https://www.amazon.com/White-Witching-Helen-Oyeyemi-ebook/dp/B00EOARZKU/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1479396885&sr=8-1&keywords=WHITE+IS+FOR+WITCHING