Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 200
January 27, 2010
Remedial Publishing Math
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...
January 25, 2010
Goblin Wedding
Fan mail is always nice. I love hearing from people who have enjoyed the goblins or the princesses, or even just a short story I wrote. But this week, I received an e-mail that took it to a whole new level of writerly awesomeness.
Bartosz Walczyk from Poland e-mailed to thank me, explaining that Wojna Goblina (Goblin War) was directly responsible for him meeting his fiancee Ann. Today's post was late because I was waiting on permission to share the story. In his own words:
I'm a teacher at s...
January 22, 2010
Friday Notes
Jaclyn Dolamore (fabulousfrock on LJ), author of Magic Under Glass [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] announced yesterday that Bloomsbury will be doing a new cover for the book. From the publisher, "The jacket design has caused offense and we apologize for our mistake. Copies of the book with a new jacket design will be available shortly."
This is Dolamore's debut novel, which is scary and exciting and stressful all by itself. Now add cover controversy and the unknown of a brand new cover. This c...
January 21, 2010
Books Read
Haven't posted any book reviews lately. Shame on me! Must remedy this…
First up, The Secret History of Moscow [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] by Ekaterina Sedia. From the synopsis:
"Galina is a young woman caught, like her contemporaries, in the seeming lawlessness of the new Russia. In the midst of this chaos, her sister Maria turns into a jackdaw and flies away - prompting Galina to join Yakov, a policeman investigating a rash of recent disappearances."
If you're looking for quick-paced...
January 20, 2010
Covers Gone Crazy
So apparently this is the week for cover art kerfuffles. We start with my own publisher DAW, who put out the anthology The Dragon and the Stars. This is an anthology of "18 original stories melding the rich cultural heritage of China with the imaginative realms of science fiction and fantasy."
In DAW's defense, I believe the budget for their monthly anthologies is significantly smaller than for original novels, which I suspect is why they tend to go with stock art for the former. And...
January 19, 2010
In Defense of Criticism
Got a note from my editor earlier this month, saying The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] was going back for a second printing! Always nice to hear.
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It doesn't matter if we're talking about racism in Transformers, research failure in Criminal Minds, plot shortcomings in Avatar … pretty much all of these discussions eventually produce comments along the lines of:
Why are you wasting your time and energy on this? Relax and enjoy it for the mindless entertainment it is.
I was able t...
January 16, 2010
Criminal Minds on Diabetes
From this week's episode of Criminal Minds, "The Uncanny Valley":
"Diabetics metabolize everything they consume differently. Food, drink, drugs … it all gets broken down into blood sugar."
Ignoring the fact that not all food and drink gets broken into blood sugar (Coke Zero, anyone?), you're telling me my drugs all turn into blood sugar too? Guess I'd better start taking insulin with my cholesterol pills from now on.
The show also asserts that diabetics can metabolize drugs faster, and thus...
January 15, 2010
File-sharing Follow-up and Friday LEGO
So on Tuesday we had an all-nighter at the E.R. Last night my four-year-old got sick. This week officially bites the wax tadpole.
I did have two follow-ups to yesterday's post on e-book file sharing.
1. It's almost a rule on the Internet: Don't read the comments. Particularly with something like book piracy, it's easy to get into rabid nastiness. Instead, once again people were thoughtful, respectful, and flat-out smart in your comments and conversation yesterday. Thank you for that. ...
January 14, 2010
Attributor's Flawed Piracy Study
Publishers Weekly posted an article talking about a book piracy study released today by the Attributor. PW article is here; their link to the original article wasn't working. My thanks to Rich at Attributor, who contacted me with a link to their study results, including methodology, here.
From PW:
Publishers could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy, a new report released today by Attributor estimates. Attributor, whose FairShare Guardian service monitors the Web for ...
January 13, 2010
Wednesday Updatezzz…
Last night did not go quite as planned, in that I didn't plan to bring my wife to the emergency room at 11:30, or to stay there waiting for doctors and lab results until 5:30 in the morning. She's fine (aside from bruises after five attempts to draw blood) — this was a scare that thankfully started to pass after the third hour of sitting and waiting in the E.R. But neither one of us are what I'd call fully functional this morning.
So today we do random updates, 'cause it's what my brain can ...
