The Plight of a Fellow Author

Stephanie Burgis is a fellow fantasy author and also a member of SFNovelists, an online group of over one hundred published speculative fiction writers, of which I am also a part.  Stephanie writes middle grade novels for Simon & Schuster, and right now her publisher is locked in an unpleasant and highly destructive battle with Barnes and Noble over pricing and marketing issues.  And like any war, there is a good deal of collateral damage.  Stephanie writes about the situation here, far more eloquently than I could.  Please read her post and then, if you're interested in her books, find a way to buy them.

Mostly, though, please remember the next time you're angry about the relative lack of availability of a book you're looking for, or about the pricing of an ebook, or about a series that is only partially in print, or any of the hundreds of other things that readers find annoying, that we authors -- at least most of us -- have precious little power in this business.  We are artists.  We write our books, we revise and polish them.  When we can, we try to promote them.  And yes, a few of us publish them ourselves.  But most of us are subject to the vagaries of the marketplace, and are powerless when the huge corporations for whom we work, in effect, decide to fight their battles publicly.

Again, here is that URL:  http://www.stephanieburgis.com/blog/caught-in-the-middle-hard-publishing-news.php