internet

Reddit AMA is now live

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Just click this link:

http://www.reddit.com/r/urbanfantasy/comments/1mfgaw/harry_connolly_ama/

and ask me anything you want.

Reddit AMA, I’m doing one

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And it’s going to be tomorrow, the 15th.

For those who don’t know, AMA stands for Ask Me Anything. Basically, people will post questions in a dedicated thread, and I’ll answer them.

That’s it. Not complicated, but very cool. I’ll post a link tomorrow to the actual post where you can do the actual asking.

Randomness for 9/12

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1) Myths over Miami: Homeless children create an elaborate mythology of the city all on their own. I swear, this is the most amazing thing.

2) Amazon collects the funniest reviews on its site.

3) A convention attendance discussion for authors on reddit.

4) What every New Yorker should know, in .gif form.

5) Gifs of gelatin cubes dropped onto solid surfaces. There’s something strangely healing about this.

6) Take a virtual tour of the world’s largest cave, discovered recently in Vietnam. Video.

7) “Attacks of Opportunity” helpfully explained and demonstrated. Video. This is funny enough that I’m looking up other videos on this channel. h/t Tracy Hurley

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.

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.

Here’s an odd birthday present

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A tweet I wrote on impulse on Saturday night has been retweeted over 275 times.

Somebody get me a little “verified” check for my name! I’m famous!

Okay, not really, but it is kinda weird. Also surprising: how little hate-tweeting I’m getting in response.

Beautiful things we find online

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People make fun of Google plus, but like any social media it has exactly the value that you and the people you interact with put into it.

For example, Fred Hicks posted this:

It’s amazing. Seriously, you should watch it with the sound on. Don’t bother if you can’t listen, too.

Social media is a lot like real life socializing. It’s not usually what you do or where, but who’s there with you.

Pratt’s writing advice, with my addendums.

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Tim Pratt posted a letter he sent to a writer who wanted to be published by a big New York publisher and it’s full of great advice. If you’re looking for advice on becoming a pro (or you’re just generally interested in that sort of thing) you should give it a read. It’s good stuff.

I would add a few things, though. First, if you’re looking to find out who is the agent for a specific writer, I find it’s much easier to just Google Specific Writer agent before I try searching their websites or acknowledgements in their books. If you Google Tim Pratt agent, you find his agent’s name right in the previews on the Google search page. If you do the same for me, you have to click through, but it’s the work of a few seconds. Super easy.

Second, rather than pay Publisher’s Lunch, I’d drop by the database of Agentquery. You can click the checkbox for one (or more) genres, then do a search (recommended: Put a “not important” in “Actively seeking new clients”), and you’ll get dozens of names of legit agents.

Sadly, it will be in no damn order at all, as far as I can tell. However, it’s easy enough to copy pasta their data into a spread sheet, then sort it by, for example, the agency where they work. It’s boring work but it’s damn easy to do.

Agentquery is also kind enough to link to agency websites. Info on their own site trumps anything you might find on other websites, such as whether they’re currently accepting queries (that’s why I suggested “not important” above).

After that, it’s a good idea to plug the agent’s name into the “Search This Forum” box at Absolute Write’s Background Check board, just in case they’re clueless or a scam.

A further bit of advice: if you’re making a list of agents and you decide you don’t want to submit to one (let’s say you are querying a science fiction novel right now but plan an epic fantasy series in the future, and discover a great agent with no interest in fantasy) it’s best to change the text of the agent’s information to a nice bright color like red rather than delete them outright. The reason is that this can be very time-consuming, and you don’t want to waste hours or minutes researching an agent you’ve already decided against once.

And that’s all. Good luck. #SFWApro

SFWA Bulletin and sexism in the genre

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I’ve been following the fight over sexist content in The Bulletin and sexist content in the genre in general, but I hadn’t planned to comment on it any more than I already have.

However! I want to drop a couple of relevant links and make a point I haven’t seen elsewhere. First, the links:

My very complicated reaction to issue 202 of the Bulletin by Mary Robinette Kowal encapsulates a lot of what I’ve been thinking about the whole shit smear. SFWA is not required to put out sexist commentary and the fact that it does (or simply lets it slip through the editorial sieve) is a major distraction from the good work it does. Her whole post is worth reading.

Ben Rosenbaum asking Malzberg and Resnick to be better people.

Ann Aguirre came into the professional part of the field only a few years before I did, but the sexism she details is ridiculous. Worse, if you read down to the ETA on that post, you see that she’s still getting vicious emails that include rape threats. I can’t stand that this bullshit is still going on.

Finally, I just want to comment on this quote from Mike Resnick in his most recent column:

The next question is: is this an overreaction to attempted censorship? The answer is simple and straightforward: I don’t think it’s possible to overreact to thought control, whether Politically Inept of Politically Motivated or merely displaying the would-be controller’s personal tastes and biases

For the record, the “attempted censorship” is the online criticism he and the magazine that published him has received. Never mind that criticism is not censorship; the point here is that Resnick thinks that only his speech should have power. He seems to think the people who criticism are welcome to do so as long as nothing comes of their speech: no one can be swayed by the points they make, no one can have their minds changed. If Resnick’s editor sees the criticism, thinks they have merit, and ends the column, that’s “censorship” and must be fought.

Which is bullshit, obviously. Speech has consequences. Speech sways the opinion of others, and maybe–just maybe–that might have an effect on your life. Resnick has that power; he’s going to have to get used to the idea that others have it, too.