Now I go home and prep the latest version of Man Bites World to send to my agent. Once she gives it a once over, she will (hopefully) give me the go ahead to send it to Del Rey.
God, I’m so ready to turn this thing in.
Watch the green lava!
StandardI did my first voice-over job today. The writer/director trusted me quite a bit when he gave me this role, and I hope I did a good job.
My son made his first Lego stop-motion animation all by himself. He even did the editing; I’m planning to ask him for tips on using iMovie later. Comments on YouTube are disabled because he’s eight, but any kind words would be welcome here.
Sales Rankings
StandardMy agent has asked me to stop looking at Child of Fire’s sales rankings on Amazon.com. She knows I know that they don’t really mean anything, but she also knows that it’s one of the few tools a writer has to see how the book is doing. Are sale trending upward? Is interest fading away? How does it compare to book X, released at the same time (which is never always fun)?
Her point (and, as always, it’s a good one) is that Amazon.com isn’t representative of certain kinds of book sales. It doesn’t match well with them and I shouldn’t even distract myself with it because it could be suggesting something that’s the opposite of what’s really going on. And I’ve taken her advice. I only visit the Amazon.com page to see if there’s a new review, although I sometimes will accidentally allow my gaze to fall on the ranking. Oops! Utterly meaningless!
The reason it’s been easy to kick the Amazon.com sales ranking habit is that I found a new, better form of crack. See, Random House has a nice list of books on their website, and if I click “science fiction/fantasy” right there in the left sidebar, they will automatically sort them by how well they’re selling that week. And, since they only update once a week, I’m not tempted to obsess
Currently, I’m on page 20 out of 99 of all Random House sf/f. Not bad (probably)! The top slots are almost always Laurell K. Hamilton, Star Wars novels and Farenheit 451. Me, I’ve been as far back and page 30, and as far forward as 12 (I wish I’d known about this when my book first came out).
And of course, I always have to click back one more page so I can trash talk the books trailing me in the list. “Eat my DUST, Stephen R. Donaldson! With your 30-something year old novel that’s still selling strong! How do you like the bottoms of my shoes! HAH!”
I consider this healthy.
Five Things Make a Friday Post
StandardAnd today it’s all about me me me!
* As of last Monday, I am officially six months overdue on delivering Man Bites World. My agent has given me firm instructions: Do not panic. The deadline for production is August, but I’m going to be turning it in that late. I’m just about finished with a round of revisions for my agent (she had a couple little notes) and once she reads and approves them, I’ll turn the book in.
Looking back, I can see it was damn smart of my editor to hold off the publication of Child of Fire for as long as she did. And I’m sorry that Game of Cages was switched from May of this year to August. Hopefully, the path in the future will be more smooth.
* In MS Word for Mac (I know. You don’t have to say it), the word count appears at the bottom of the window… unless the count goes into six figures, at which point it disappears. I hate that. I like maps, clocks, WYSIWYG, and word counts. I like to know where I am. That’s why I feel a certain joyful satisfaction when I trim a manuscript below the 100,000 word mark and the total count suddenly appears onscreen.
Yesterday, I was tempted to stop revising ten minutes early so I could write “I’m at 99,999 words now!” in this post, but I resisted. See point one.
* Am I going to Norwescon? I don’t know! I received an invitation around Christmastime, filled it out and sent it in, but I haven’t heard back. It’s less than a month away and my name isn’t on the long list of “panel participants.” Now, I’ve never been to a convention before, so maybe it’s commonplace for a confirmation to arrive less than a month before the event. Maybe it’s common for an invitation to be rescinded (which would be understandable, since I can only go one day) without notifying the attendee. I dunno, but I’ve sent an email to registration to inquire.
I’m half-hoping they’ll tell me I’ve been struck from the list. Saturdays are supposed to be family time for me, but revisions have been eating all my time, and then there’d be a convention, and the following week…
* I’m going to have a signing at the Tukwila Barnes & Noble on April 10th at 1 pm. It won’t be a reading (Ixnay on the Eadingray!), just a signing and talk with four authors: Gayle Ann Williams (Tsunami Blue), Jessa Slade (Seducing the Shadows), Mark Henry (Battle of the Network Zombies), and little ole me. If you live in the Puget Sound area, swing on by.
* You know what amazes me? I can revise a book three times and, on the fourth runthrough, discover an incredible number of word echoes, clumsy sentence constructions, responses to sensory input before the sensory input, and dialog that would register as “eyeroll” on a Turing test. It still astonishes me that my own errors can be so difficult to see.
* Only two entries so far in the Child of Fire giveaway contest (Here’s the LiveJournal version). Just sayin’. This is the last giveaway I’m going to do for a while. I have a small stack of books I’m going to save for late summer, in case CoF isn’t available in stores when Game of Cages comes out.
Reader, I lol-ed
StandardI’m pretty critical of Republicans and conservatives on this blog, but I want to give a fair shake to the whackawoowoo Democrats we see.
For instance! Democrat Kesha Rogers won the primary for 22nd District of Texas (covering Galveston and some surrounding areas), running heavily on a single issue: President Obama must be impeached.
Candidate Rogers is a proud Larouchite. May I quote the statement her campaign made after her victory? Wonderful.
The victory in the 22nd Congressional District yesterday by LaRouche Democrat Kesha Rogers sent an unmistakable message to the White House, and its British imperial controllers: Your days are numbered. Kesha’s campaign hit relentlessly at a single theme, that President Obama must go, that his attacks on this nation – with his dismantling of the manned space program, his efforts to ram through a fascist, killer “health care” policy, his endless bailouts for Wall Street swindlers, while demanding budget cuts which will increase the death rates among the poor, the sick, the elderly and the unemployed – are not acceptable, and will not be tolerated.
Skeptics said that LaRouche’s approach is impractical, it won’t work, that Democrats will never support someone who is calling for the President’s impeachment. Obviously, the voters of the 22nd district disagreed with those skeptics, as Kesha received 53% of the vote against two opponents. As Kesha told the Galveston Daily News last night, when a reporter asked if she expected support from the Democratic Party in the fall election, “I am leading a war against the British Empire. I’m not worried about what Democratic Party hacks say or do.”
Read the whole thing, if you like. FYI, the acronym “LYM” stands for “Larouche Youth Movement.”
The 22nd district is Tom Delay’s old district.
Here’s her introductory video. I can’t watch it because I’m day jobbing, but does she really promise to “take our troops out of the war zone and put them into space”? Look out, British Empire!
Randomness for 3/4
Standard1) Admiral Akbar leading the votes to become new sports mascot at Ole Miss. Shockingly, this particular “rebel” has students threatening to transfer if he shows up at games. Because that’s what important about college: the sports mascot.
2) Major retailers caught selling used lingerie. Oh, Victoria’s Secret, you’re so sexy!
3) Another way to lower health care costs. Quote: “Only about half of patients who are prescribed a medication for a chronic condition are still taking the drug regularly after a year, says Daniel Touchette, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.”
4) Comic artist accused of copying another artist, with added moral complications. Lightbox ftl.
5) All 137 years of Popular Science Magazine in a searchable online format.
6) Quote of the day: “The problem with hockey is that everyone has a stick.” From http://www.postcardsfromyomomma.com/
7) Movies condensed into six-panel comics. Spoilers for various and sundry.
As a followup to my previous post
StandardThat comment I made about sending a book to a reader who has a grandmom with a blog? Totally not a joke. So I’ll have a contest. Post a link to your grandmother’s[1] blog and I’ll mail you a copy of Child of Fire, anywhere in the world. I’ll look at all the blogs, and whoever posts the most interesting one will win (Yes, I have Sekrit Reezinz for this).
Additionally, I’d ask that you review the book yourself online–positively or negatively, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s an honest opinion.
[1] It does not have to be your actual grandmother. Or a real grandmother at all. Just post a link to an interesting blog written by a woman over 65–it could be your own!–and you can consider yourself entered.
Wha? “Sponsored Reviews?”
StandardEven though it’s been five months since Child of Fire came out, I’m still contacting reviewers, hoping to get a little more exposure. I’ve slowed down quite a bit, but I still mail off the odd book now and then.
So, as I was looking over N.K. Jemison’s new book on Big River dot com to see if it’s a hardcover (and thus too spendy to buy at my local shop) I saw a review posted there by sacramentobookreview.com.
Interesting! So I pop over to their site and poke around. No they haven’t reviewed CoF before. Yes, here are there guidelines for authors who want to send them a book. And here are their prices for a sponsored review.
Cue needle-scratching-an-LP sound. A “sponsored” review?? Well, yes. You can pay to have a review “expedited” which costs $99 for a Standard Turnaround (9-12 weeks) up to $299 for an Expedited Turnaround (2-4 weeks).
They don’t promise a positive review, only a “professional” one, and they don’t promise that a paid review will appear in the paper. However, if they don’t, the author will receive an advertisement instead and the size of the ad depends on which “turnaround” price they pay.
They also promise to put the review into their “publication pipeline” which apparently means Amazon.com, their syndication service, and their website.
As I said above, there’s nothing on the site (that I could find) that promises a rave review. I also didn’t find a disclaimer specifically explaining that cutting a check is no guarantee of a positive review. Still, it strikes me as fishy; I wouldn’t send them anything simply because a reader might wonder if I slipped a couple of bucks into the book, and jeez, people, I’d send a copy to your sickly grandmother if she had a blog.
Vaguely uncool. I’m going to email writer beware about it.
Oh, and because I should make this clear, I am in no way suggesting that N.K. Jemison wrote a check for the review they gave her. In. No. Way.
Randomness for 3/3
Standard1) I wish someone could explain to me the causes of the great Balloons Monkey War. Added later: Ah! It was unprovoked Monkey aggression.
2) Five links about selling books.
3) The Venn Diagram of Monsters.
4) Now that Harriet the Spy is being updated as Harriet the blogger, Jezebel.com offers other classics of children’s lit that could be updated for modern times.
5) What Science TV is like. via nihilistic_kid
6) Math A Capella (the internet triples its total nerdiness with one video)
7) If Pitagora Suichi made a music video. Yeah, this one is seriously cool, possibly the coolest thing I’ve linked to in a long time. Don’t skip it.
Foreign rights
StandardThe announcement just went up on Publisher’s Marketplace, so I guess I can announce it here: My agency has sold French language rights for Child of Fire and Game of Cages to Bibliothèque Interdite! Whoo-hoo! That makes two foreign language sales (so far) Russian and French.
Profitez des bons moments!