C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 108

more media plans :)

I just discovered Ron Perlman is on Twitter (he’s perlmutations, since the resounding response from my Twitter feed was WHAT WHERE?!) and this has somehow immediately blown out of control into an 2014 International Re-Watch Beauty and the Beast-fest, so, y’know, if you’ve been meaning to do that, we’ll be doing that next year. An episode a week, probably, starting early (but probably not instantly) in the new year, with live tweeting. :)

Along with re-reading Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels and clear...

birthday books

Upon the occasion of his 11th birthday, we gave our older nephew THE SWORD OF SHANNARA, A PRINCESS OF MARS and the Complete Novels of Sherlock Holmes.

He opened the Shannara book and looked at it with great dubiousness, proclaiming, “I’ve never heard of Terry Brooks.”

“This time last year, you hadn’t heard of David Eddings, whom you now love,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “How did I find out about David Eddings?”

“Aunt Catie gave you the books,” my sister Deirdre said dryly, and he c...

Aer Lingus: Fail

My parents had Adventures in Airlines flying to America in October, and have been trying to resolve it since returning home. This is a repost of my Mom’s latest update on the situation:

I’ve been trying for a couple months to get a response from Aer Lingus regarding our trip to America in mid-October. Today I received a “donotreply” from them in which they cheerfully acknowledged that their agent screwed up, but essentially said, “Too bad.” My reaction is to write to the only source available...

Picoreview: The Desolation of Smaug

Picoreview: The Desolation of Smaug: It is my personal hope that there will be a 2 hour Director’s Cut of The Hobbit that only has, you know. The stuff in the book.

We re-watched An Unexpected Journey last night, which is frankly a long, long movie in which almost nothing happens. Smaug possibly, if you look at it sideways, has more happen, but (major structural spoilers ahoy)

they cut the movie in the wrong fucking place. I mean, as in, they left me genuinely pissed off at the end. The movie’...

The TBR Shelf Listing:

Not, infuriatingly, in alphabetical order, because my books aren’t that organized right now, grr.

There are several I’ve got on my e-reader that I’m not going to list right now because it’s too much effort to turn it on, and some I’ll hopefully get for Christmas, but yeah. There’s already 50 books on this list and that’s not including (save one) the GGK re-reread.

And then in 2015 I will read ALL THE BOOKS BY PEOPLE I KNOW that I am not caught up on, because gawd. Seriously, if I culled those o...

total fanboy moment

So last night I was catching up on Guy Gavriel Kay‘s journal instead of going to sleep as I should have been, and I’m skimming along and something italicized caught my eye as I flashed past it:

Meeting Guy Gavriel Kay pretty much turned me into a gibbering idiot. The worst part was that he’s kind of shy, so after I babbled at him I literally couldn’t figure out a way to keep–or more accurately, *start*–an actual coversation. “I love your books!” I said to him. “They make me cry!”

“Everybody says that,” he responded, a little wryly. “I’m afraid that’s what they’ll put on  my gravestone: “He made me cry.””

Me: *inane attempts to assure him I meant it in a good way, followed by slinking off feeling silly*

Huh, I thought as I skimmed by, that sounds like something I’d write. Or wrote. Wait. WAIT. I DID WRITE THAT!WHAT?!? *scrolls back, discovers that yes, in fact, I have been name-checked in GGK’s journal, turns purple from blushing*!

Anyway, the post was about author encounters, and somebody had pointed him at a guest blog I’d done recently where I was asked if there were any writers that made me weak in the knees at the idea of meeting, to which I responded the above. :) He said he wasn’t actually shy, and I admitted that possibly my SHEER NERVOUSNESS had caused me to attribute shyness to him when it was really more panic and flailing on my part. :)

And then this morning he’d emailed me to say “Next time we’re in the same area, find me, and if you eschew nervousness I shall endeavor not to be shy!”

Excuse me while I do a totally dorkalicious fanboy dance. :)

No Dominion & publishing thoughts

So posted over on Facebook saying:

Apparently, 20p will become the new default price for ebooks as this is what Sony are doing by way of promotion, and the books featured are gobbling up market share. Can someone remind these nitwits of the old, tried and true saying “Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality’?

Oh, wait, maybe this has nothing at all to do with books, readers or writers. Forcing Amazon to price match is costing Amazon millions. That reminds me of another saying. “When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.’

Which made me think about NO DOMINION, which is doing pretty well in its first couple weeks of release. It’s been hanging out in the top 50ish of Amazon’s contemporary fantasy ratings for a fair amount of its release time. I’m hoping it’ll get up to the top 20, because that’s where it becomes self-sustaining for a while (if you want to mention it to your readers, the Kindle version is here… O.O), but the top 50 is very good.

Actually, it’s excellent when you take into account that I released the book at full price. , who is the person who suggested I try crowdfunding in the first place, said recently that he’d have suggested I set NO DOMINION at a lower, entry-level price to get up in the Amazon ranks. But since he didn’t suggest it and I didn’t even think of it, I didn’t. I just set it at full price. Between Amazon Kindle, the print edition and the Nook edition, it’s sold about 700 copies in the two weeks since it was released.

“I,” Bryant said, “would have been wrong.”

And so are the publishing companies. People will pay for a product as long as they can 1. get it easily*, and 2. believe it’ll be worth the price.

I mean, maybe I’m missing out on millions of new readers by doing it this way, but at least I don’t feel like I’m undervaluing my work.

And as Bryant also pointed out, pricing it at full price and still having the book in the top 50 or so Amazon rankings for contemporary fantasy means that the writers I’m hanging with–others in the top 50 who are at full price–are the big boys: Jim Butcher. Kim Harrison. Charlaine Harris. Kevin Hearne.

Everybody else in the top 50 right now is priced at under $5, and (without trying to sound self-aggrandizing, and indeed with the awareness that I may just not be Up enough on the latest releases), I don’t know any of their names. Obviously this wouldn’t be a good strategy if I was new to the field, but with my career so far, this approach seems to be working just fine.

And I really do believe that if the publishing industry wasn’t running around in such a panic that there’s a lot they could do to strengthen sales and break Amazon’s back. (Seriously, it’s like Napster happened in a separate universe from them.) They could:

- bundle an e-edition with the purchase of any print book

- release mass market and e-books first, then release the hardback several months later for collectors

- work together to create an alternate storefront to Amazon, followed by

- going in with ANYONE ELSE, Kobo or Nook or Sony whatever, to push that brand of DRM-free e-reader on the storefront

- a major advertising campaign about how books never run out of batteries/etc, featuring the new storefront, followed by

- ceasing to give Amazon deep discounts (which the publishing industry needs to do anyway, not just with Amazon)

They’re coming from behind, so it would require a hell of a lot of work, but it’s not impossible. And I recognize that speaking and acting as an individual, I can respond a great deal more quickly than the behemoth of the publishing industry…but at the same time, the publishing industry really is following the music industry’s mistakes slavishly. Looking toward where the music industry has gone could save them time and trouble.

But wait! What about pricing? Everybody knows that people won’t pay more than $.99 for content!

Well, first go up and re-read the first part of this blog about the NO DOMINION sales. Then bear in mind that a song is usually released for in the region of $.99, but if you buy every song on the album for that much, you’re paying anywhere from $12-20 for the album in most cases anyway. People *will* pay full price for digital material if they think it’s worth it. And I personally believe my stories are worth it, or else why would I even be doing this job in the first place?

Furthermore, it certainly appears readers also think my stories are worth it. As a rule, the only people who don’t seem to be sure are the publishing industry, which is just all messed up. There are much better ways for the publishing industry to break Amazon’s chokehold than cutting their own throats.

*I need to get it up via Smashwords. *sighs & adds something else to the to-do list…*

Bulwer-Lytton & Haiku contest winners!

Some of these are genuinely appalling. :)

The Bulwer-Lytton contest winners of MOUNTAIN ECHOES are:

Amy Bennett, for

As I tenderly ran my hands through Coyote’s thick, slightly damp fur, my searching fingertips brushed over several small raised imperfections, causing me to wonder if  he  had become an unfortunate host to a horde of parasitic dog fleas, (Ctenocephalides canis), whose fairer sex can lay 4,000 eggs each, which had me considering which style and hue of flea collar would best coordinate with his gorgeous 1934 Indian Chief motorcycle.

, for

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain not only fell in torrents, but splashed back up to cloud the vision of our heroine as she tromped through the streets (for it is in Seattle that our story begins), creating rainbow-hued runnels in the gutters and miniature ponds in the eddies of the corners.

Plumfan Rockwell, for

It was a bright and sunny day; the sun shone down in bright beams blinding Morrison-except at occasional intervals when the clouds, an unremarkable occurrence in Seattle, would skitter across her cosmic sphere, to the scene taking place below his office window.

Sandy Giden, for

Gary stood next to his taxi looking down the rain slicked street into a fog so thick that it turned the street lights into miniature pale moons partly covered by whispy clouds hoping that Cernnunous’ horde wouldn’t come riding out of it like a pack of armour clad hell hounds.

, for

In her thirty-sixth straight hour of being awake and trying to save Seattle’s Chinatown from being destroyed by a rampaging yaoguai, Jo suddenly realized that Morrison’s eyes were the same brilliant shade of blue as those jugs of watered-down washer fluid you could buy at the questionable run-down middle-of-nowhere gas stations that dotted the interstate here and there, the ones where you were never quite sure whether the clerks wanted to get your money and get you gone as soon as possible, or kidnap you and string you up in some kind of Oklahoma Chainsaw Massacre for being a nosy outsider prying into things you shouldn’t; it was such a distinctive color, she wondered why she’d never made the connection before.

, for

Jo walked, not too fast and not too slow, down the cobblestone sidewalk that was so mismatched it looked like the stones had just been cobbled together, as she made her way to the airport to fly home to a place where she no longer had a job because she had been gone for three months when she should have been gone but one, all the while blissfully unaware in her misery that by the end of the day (or by the next morning, at the very least) she would no longer be plain Joanne Walker but would again be weighted, occultly, with the appellation of Joanne Walkingstick (not that she would let anyone, even herself, call her by it), though it would be many a month before she would come to fully embrace her new kick-assedness.

, for

It was the worst of years, it was the best of years, except the normalcy in the rare moments between learning experiences, assignments, murder, magic, misconceptions about Muldoon, mingling with gods, ghosts, gathering spirit guides, driving Morrison’s crazy, out of body experiences, a few sword fights, some fur flying, and the undead, in other words adventures in growing into a new soul of two cultures.

(Yes, there are 7, not 6, because I gave away a couple extras over on FB in thanks to the people who came up with the contest ideas, so I thought I’d do an extra one here too. :))

Kristy Moen, for

Mountain Echoes are

Swift blowing winds over a

Bright white capped summit

Shannon O’Dea, for

everybody knows

old dogs cannot learn knew tricks

unless you’re Muldoon

Karl Kloeden, for

nʞıɐɥ sıɥʇ ʇsnɾ ɹo

uʍop ǝpısdn ǝɟıl ɹǝɥ pǝuɹnʇ puɐ

ǝʞoʍɐ ɔıƃɐɯ s,oſ

Deborah Blake, for

Joanne fights for Good

Against impossible odds

Gary has her back

Diane P. DesAutels, for

Joanne Walkingstick:

Her own past and other realms

This shaman remade

April Koenig, for

Watchful guardians

Coyote, Raven and Snake

Sleep girl, you are loved

Goodreads giveaway!

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Goodreads Book Giveaway







Mountain Echoes



by C.E. Murphy

Giveaway ends January 24, 2013.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

MOUNTAIN ECHOES give-away!

I got two boxes full of MOUNTAIN ECHOES today, so there is now a contest on!

I’m sure you’re all familiar with Bulwer-Lytton and the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest. If you’re not, go read about it, I’m not going to explain.

The contest: write a Bulwer-Lytton sentence about a Walker Papers character. The best (or worst) six sentences will win a signed copy of MOUNTAIN ECHOES. Please post your responses at this journal entry!

You may only enter once. However, you may enter *each* of the contests I’m running once. Go check out my facebook page for the haiku contest, and next week I’ll post a Goodreads give-away after they’ve approved it.

Go forth, win! :) Contest ends Monday the 21st, evening-ish EST. Basically, when I say so. :)