Long Overdue: Amazon MatchBook and What It Means For Me

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(Announcement buried below)

If someone from Del Rey/Random House is reading this, please feel free to put my books into Amazon’s MatchBook program.

If you haven’t heard of this new program, it works like this: For publishers who sign on to the program, readers who buy (or have bought) a physical book from Amazon.com will have the opportunity to also buy the ebook edition at a discounted price. Some books will be as low as $2.99, some will be free.

So, if you bought CHILD OF FIRE when it came out in 2009, you could (if Del Rey signs the contract) pick up an ebook copy for cheap.

I’ve already seen some authors speaking against this deal. They don’t like the bundling and they earn part of their living from people who buy replacement copies for books that wear out.

Another strike against is the fact that I could buy a copy of a book, give it to my buddy Jim as a gift, then pick up a cheap/free version for myself.

Yeah, what Amazon is doing is selling the content, but what the have the right to sell is the copy. The whole point of copyright is that I make copies of my IP and sell them to people who want to buy them; if I’m selling the right for another person to make more copies, that person is a publisher and we need to have a publishing deal.

Except that model has been under serious strain for a long time. It’s now trivially easy to make copies of other people’s work, and some people can be amazingly clueless about it:

“Help me download a copy of your book without paying you!” I mean, Jesus.

But these are just bumps in the road. I think that selling the content over the copy is the way of the future and I’m surprised it took so long for a program like MatchBook to get started. Yes, the readers who want an author to fix their torrents are annoying. Yeah, getting a free copy of a book you intend to give away is a pretty nice deal.

It’s good promotion, though. There are a handful of books out there that won’t need it, but most do. I don’t blame any author for shying away from this deal, but I think that, overall, it will be a good thing for those who sign up.

I also strongly suspect that this is part of a plan to drive self-publishers to CreateSpace, which they should have been doing anyway.

What’s that? you say. How can you talk about using CreateSpace when TWENTY PALACES is still ebook only?

Well, here’s the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: Lately, with the help of a saint of a human being, I’ve been working on creating a paper edition of TWENTY PALACES. If you’ve never read it because (like me) you don’t read ebooks, you will soon get a chance. Also: to buy a copy for your friends. Also: to buy a copy for your friends and get a discounted ebook for yourself.

The book won’t be available for some weeks yet; there’s still a lot to do. Frankly, one of the reasons I’m prepping this is to buffer the budget for my upcoming Kickstarter on The Great Way (I wrote a status post about that over the weekend). The other is so we’ll get to have Christmas this year. Yeah, it’s getting to be like that.

But… MatchBook: I’m surprised it took this long and while I expect there to be bumps, this should be a great thing.

Randomness for 9/2

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1) Darkseid is impressed by Thanos’s coffee.

2) 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense Of The World. James Nicoll, some of these are relevant to your interests.

3) High-speed camera captures the amazing details of insect flight, and teach us a little something about how it works.

4) How to build a cat fountain in Minecraft. Video. Note: that’s not a fountain for cats to drink from. No, it is not.

5) The Most Important Book on Color Theory Is Now an iPad App.

6) Online order forms for pizza delivery places let people ask for special requests, like “Draw a wizard on the box…” and they do.

7) A printer with no paper tray. You just set it on top of a stack of paper and let it go. h/t @KeithCalder

Buy Books, Do Good #NotRothfuss

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Hey, it’s just about time for Pat Rothfuss’s Worldbuilder fundraising to begin again, and if you’re like me, you like the idea of little kids having food and families taking care of their own. Not Facebook “like” but actual like.

Well, as the first volley in this year’s drive, Barnes & Noble is holding a bookfair to benefit the charity. When you buy any book (not just mine!) at any B&N (even online) and use the right Bookfair code (11162161) Worldbuilders will get part of that money. If you’d like to have a piece of paper to carry into the story with you, there’s a printable here (pdf).

We’re not talking about a small piece, either. Worldbuilders will get 10% of each sale, unless they go over $10K: then they get 20%.

Does that sound good to you? It sounds good to me. The bookfair lasts until September 2nd in physical stores and until September 7th if you order online.

The State of the Kickstarter Address

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You guys know I’ve finished draft zero of The Great Way and that I’m planning to bring it out into the world myself, via Kickstarter. “Where is this Kickstarter?” some have asked, “I have money I want to give you!”

Hey, I want to have new books to sell you, too. Since finishing Circle of Enemies, I’ve written more than half a million words, and only King Khan, the Spirit of the Century tie-in novel, is set to be published (later this fall). Sure, I was in a couple of anthologies last year, but you know, this is not how careers are built.

So, Kickstarter: since finishing the draft, I’ve been working pretty hard setting up the pledge drive. I type things, I erase them. I shoot a video of myself explaining the project, then watch it, then apologize to my wife for the way I look, then shoot another one. A lot of other peoples’ projects have little animations at the front, so I tried to make one, too. In the end, I pitched 90% of it. So while I wouldn’t say that time was wasted, I… oh wait, yes it was. Those days were totally wasted on stuff I’m not good at.

I’d hoped to be finished in time for a mid-August launch. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Once the project was ready, I asked some people to take a look at the preview and give me some feedback. Now I have to tear it all apart and revise.

Well, not all of it, but I’m a writer who lives and dies by his revisions. This needs revisions. And since the best time to launch a Kickstarter is the second half of the month, I’m now looking at mid-September.

Which means I don’t have to worry about the Labor Day weekend, I can revise the textual description of my books, and I can redo the video.

Yeah, that means you get the books a month later, but what can I tell you? Things take time, you guys.

I’m sure you have to be a fan of Breaking Bad to get this.

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Ben Batfleck is not such a bad thing

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Last night Twitter (and the rest of the internet) had a bit of a freak-out about Ben Affleck being cast as Batman in the new Man of Steel movie. Most of them were all: “Have we watched Daredevil and died in vain?”

But hey, remember when this guy was cast as Batman?

Good times, good times. Everyone thought he would be completely wrong for the part, and you know what? He was!

But it wasn’t his fault. Tim Burton made a Batman movie but he didn’t actually like Batman.

Remember this guy?

Head quirks aside, George Clooney was a terrific Batman, but his movie was even more ridiculous and off-putting than Keaton’s. There’s a case to be made for calling it a camp classic, I guess, but it didn’t do much for the franchise and it certainly didn’t help Clooney.

But what about Batman Begins? That was a great Batman, right? Hey, did you know how hard it is to find a picture of Bale in the mask with his mouth open? I think this is why:

Look at that damn tongue. When he’s playing other roles, t’s not such a big deal that Bale talks with his whole freaking tongue right at the front of his mouth, but the Batman mask focuses people’s attention on the actor’s mouth because that’s the only human part showing. It was the most distracting thing about the movie, even beyond the voice.

But you know what? It was still a good performance. Even better, it was a pretty good movie with a pair of good/pretty good sequels.

And now the terrible Affleck Daredevil is the cause of a lot of shirt-tearing. Well, I’m going to come out and say it: The problem with Daredevil was the movie itself, not the performance. Affleck’s name is the one everyone knows, but he wasn’t to blame for that script (with Murdock kung fu fighting in his civvies to flirt with Elektra) or the ridiculous cgi and sound effects. There were several scenes that worked, and part of the reason they worked was Affleck’s performance (I’m thinking about the aftermath of the fight in the bar specifically).

I wanted to drop in a clip of the more egregious fake effects here, but Fox is careful about yanking its IP off YouTube.

So Affleck’s performance as Batman will be well-received in large part depending on how the script is written, how the scenes are shot, and a thousand other factors. Batman movies have reached the point of being franchises, like James Bond; it’s no longer enough for most of the audience to say “Batman movie!” and get people to line up. You need to make an actually decent movie. Like Clooney, Affleck will be remembered by the quality of the film he’s in.

Did I mention it’s being directed by Zach Snyder?

Added later: io9’s 50+ greatest tweets about Affleck being cast as Batman

When the cat’s at home the mice bust their asses

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This week my wife’s workplace is shut down for their annual week of cleaning, which means that she can take kid patrol duties from me. A whole week.

I haven’t been around much lately but this means I’ll be on the internet even less as I try to get work done. My list

Finish and send short story
Finish KS video
Get KS up and running
Finish Lightning Source Registration
[Thing]
Send emails
Start revising The Great Way

Not in order of importance, obviously.

I expect this will keep my hopping while she’s gone and while she’s here, too. Hope you guys are doing well.

New page on my site: Kid Reads

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You know how some parents are always talking about what prodigious readers their are? “My little eight year old just loved 100 Years Of Solitude! Now she’s moved on to Russian poetry, but that’s fine. She’s entitled to her beach reads.” What books their kids read and how many they consume are like ornaments for their parents.

My kid, he’s not like that.

He’s fussy, easily-bored, and emits a high, uncanny keening when forced to read something against his will. That noise isn’t a whine; it goes beyond whining into a kind of shared pain that only parents truly understand. He doesn’t impress people with his books. He just enjoys them.

So we often have people ask us what he reads. I’m guessing they think that, being the son of a writer, he will walk away from a Minecraft session of his own volition for his love of books.

Nope. He wants books that are fun, funny, and fast-paced. So when people ask what sorts of books we recommend for their own reluctant readers, those are the books we recommend.

Anyway, to make things easier on us, I’ve put together a page called “Kid Reads” which contains lists of books he really enjoyed.

Check it out.

Randomness for 8/12

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1) A really wonderful webcomic. Seriously. Check it out. You might have to scroll down a little.

2) 28 things that happened in the Harry Potter universe after the books ended. (according to JK Rowling)

3) Whale nearly swallows divers. Video

4) Comedian hides funny/absurd messages in hotel rooms.

5) Ten coolest things you can make with a 3D printer. Yeah, it’s a slide show, but this one’s worth it.

6) Copy machine changes numbers when making copies. h/t Making Light.

7) Very interesting: Husband takes photos to convince wife that her hallucinations aren’t real, but wife sees them in photos, too. After being put on a new drug, the hallucinations mostly go away, except in those photos.

First draft of The Great Way finished

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Yesterday, Saturday, I put in a 4,334 word day to wrap up the rough draft of my epic fantasy trilogy, The Great Way. I’ve even come up with a third title for the individual volumes:

The Way Into Chaos
The Way Into Magic
The Way Into Darkness.

If I were smart, I’d switch the last two around so the series order would be alphabetical order, too. We’ll see how smart I am.

Anyway, I had several long days in a row to reach the end, and I think it’s a bit odd for the end of an epic fantasy. I think it works for the overall story, but I’m used to seeing a clash of armies at the end of a fantasy trilogy and in this story there are no armies left.

But that’s me, immediately thinking of all the ways something is wrong. I think they’re good books, and they’ll be much better when I get a revision done.

The Kickstarter to pay for art, editing, and design will be coming soon. Maybe as soon as a couple of weeks. I just have to work out a few questions regarding time and money budgets and do the video.

Holy shit. Kickstarter. This is a scary new world for me.