publishing

Kickstarter follow ups

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The Tales of the Emerald Serpent anthology is over and it’s fully funded:

(Let’s see if iframe will work in WordPress.)

Thanks to everyone who pledged. I know a lot of readers were unhappy that the benefit level for a physical book was so spendy, but when the book itself comes out I’m sure you can pick up a copy at regular book price.

The Dinopacalypse Kickstarter is nearly over…

and is running out of stretch goals. The benefit levels are pretty reasonable, too. At this point you can get ebooks of several of those novels for a paltry pledge. Take a look.

Finally, here’s a project I’m not involved in at all, except as a backer:

Sentinels of the Multiverse is my new favorite game to play with my son, and they made their goal for the new expansion set AND the second edition of the basic game in one day. That’s how popular this game is becoming. Personally, I’m hoping that they make their stretch goals so we can get the “promo cards” that let us change the way games are played.

Anyway, I’ve been recommending this game (as often as I do such things) but at this point I think it would be best to pick up the second edition. It will have better game balance for the villains and will make record-keeping less of a chore. And the Rook City expansion means tougher fights.

Added later: iframe doesn’t work in the cross-poster, so I’ve added links in the text.

Follow up to Wednesday’s post about Agency pricing and the online store

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First the store: It’s not working and I don’t know why it’s not working. Shopp’s help system isn’t very helpful but I plan to create a help ticket (or whatever they call it) sometime tomorrow morning.

Until this gets fixed, everyone who buys a story directly from me will have to wait for me to email the file to them. I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t see another way to handle this for right now. To complicate things, I’m going away this weekend and don’t know how much internet access I’ll have. No matter what, I hope to get some Starbucks time to check emails and so forth.

Anyway, yeah I suck. No big.

About the agency pricing thing: John Scalzi already wrote some sensible advice for people who root for one side or the other in the ebook price battles. But one thing I want to point out (and I’ve talked about this before, bear with me) is that these changes are not the result of some inexorable process.

For too many people, the changes we see around us are treated as though they’re the result of “natural” progressions. They think that New York City has a bunch of highways cutting through it because people like cars, and that’s also Los Angeles dumped the trolley system in favor of all those freeways. But that’s bullshit; people made those decisions, and they didn’t make them because Americans were clamoring for it. They had the power to do what they thought was best and highways were it.

You can argue whether it was a good choice or not (I think not) but despite the fact that people love cars and were buying cars as fast as we could make them, other choices could have been made, other directions taken.

The same is true for ebooks. E-readers and ebooks are beloved by some people, and they want more and more of them. I don’t find ebooks very convenient but I’m not against them–the first half of this post was all about the difficulties I’ve had selling them.

Still talking about “publishers fighting to protect their old business model” or “Time to get ready for this new economy” is childish crap. It’s Naivete dressed up in Cynicism’s old clothes. There is no unavoidable future here, there are only choices. Either we make the choices, or people with money and power will make them for us.

Personally, I’d like to see us work on a system that fosters competitiveness and openness, and you don’t get that with either collusion or monopolies.

Amazon, Macmillan and my online store

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While it may seem as though I repaired my online store today because of turmoil in the online bookselling world (for the click-phobic, that’s a WSJ report that the Dept. of Justice is filing a lawsuit against Apple and five of the so-called Big Six publishers because of agency pricing), that’s just a coincidence. For one thing, Random House came to agency pricing later than the others, so the accusation of collusion doesn’t work. For another, it’s not like I’m selling a ton of books at the moment anyway.

No, the truth is that Shopp 1.2 wasn’t working. Now that they’ve released Shopp 1.2.1, I’m hopeful that it will. If you’re interested in picking up a copy of some of my short fiction or the Twenty Palaces prequel, [link deleted]. Just be aware, initial first buyers, that you will be my guinea pigs; I haven’t confirmed that the store works yet. If it doesn’t, I’ll have to pull it offline again.

As for the collusion charges, I’m doubtful about them. I can understand why Amazon wants them to be sustained; their business model relied on taking losses to drive competitors out of the market. Amazon would like to be in the place that Wal-Mart is: they want to be the only retailer connecting large groups of consumers and the people who create products they want to consume.

Of course that won’t happen, and I know it. Didn’t I just put up my own online store again, where I sell electronic versions of my fiction directly to you?

But the portion of the market that Amazon already controls is alarming, and I say that as a person who makes the bulk of his self-publishing money through them. Over Christmas, I earned ten times as much money through Amazon as I did through my own site, and that takes into account the higher royalties I get through Shopp/PayPal.

So I’m not anti-Amazon by any means. I’m also not against the large New York publishers, several of which are already settling the case, according the early news reports. For me, as a writer, I want both to be healthy and vibrant ongoing concerns.

But I also want there to be smaller publishers and smaller booksellers, too, and independent brick and mortar shops where I can browse the shelves, plus online sellers like Indiebound, B&N, all of them. The real threat to this strong market isn’t from the traditional publishers, it’s coming from Amazon and their increasingly draconian contract demands.

A world where Amazon has cornered the market in books and ebooks would be harmful to me, personally. I want them to be out there in the mix, connecting readers to books, but I do NOT want them to strangle everyone else until they dominate the market.

So I’m pleased to see that John Sargent at Macmillan is planning to fight the case. Go, him. And I hope the DOJ moves beyond the accusations of collusion and start looking at the market share that Amazon currently holds, and their own vertical integration issues with the launch of their own publishing arm.

It’s not about being pro-Apple/anti-Apple, or being pro-Amazon/anti-Amazon. It’s not about “liking” NY publishers or an online store. I’m not pro or con any of those things, and I certainly don’t “like” one massive corporation over another. Anyone who says they do is a bit of a fool.

But I do want a healthy market, and I’m not sure the Department of Justice is acting in the best interest of that market.

Two Kickstarters at once

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As I write this on 5pm PST on Tuesday, the Kickstarter for the Professor Khan novel (KING KHAN!) I’m planning to write, which needed to reach $25K to be funded, now has fewer than twelve hundred dollars to go.

And it turns out I had the details of the stretch goals wrong in yesterday’s post: Evil Hat has already committed to publishing a stand alone Spirit of the Century novel starring mystic detective Benjamin Hu, written by Brian Clevinger, creator of Atomic Robo comics. I can’t believe I left that out. A $10 pledge would get you an ebook of that novel, too, along with all the others.

Also, BoingBoing did a brief news article on the Mayan-themed anthology I’m in, and now that project has less than fourteen hundred dollars to make its funding goal.

Kickstarter is doing pretty well by me right now.

I’m going to write about a gorilla who teaches at Oxford (I hope!)

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It’s true. I don’t know if you’ve been following Evil Hat’s Dinopacalypse Kickstarter, but they started with a goal of $5K and blew through that in no time. This is one company that’s really making Kickstarter work for them.

Anyway, the “stretch goals” (projects they’ll fund if they reach funding levels past their original ones) have been pretty cool. At $15K, they committed to a whole trilogy of Dinopacalypse books…

Wait, I haven’t described these books yet, have I? They’re set in the Spirit of the Century game universe, an early 20th century pulp adventure role playing game in which player-characters who protect the world from conqueror apes using technology from lost Atlantis, thwart the schemes of Doctor Scrooge to steal from the poor, destroy death rays, and otherwise take out mad scientists, world conquerors, and evil sorcerers.

The Dinopacalypse books are about Gorilla Khan, conqueror ape, taking over the world with the help of psychic dinosaurs. Beyond that, the stretch goal for $20K is an Amelia Stone novel–she’s a hero who battles monster gangsters in 1930’s Paris–written by C.E. Murphy herself.

And then there’s the $25K goal, which will get you a book written by me. Yep, if the Kickstarter hits that mark, I will write a pulp adventure novel about Professor Khan, a hyper-intelligent gorilla turned Oxford professor and disillusioned “son” of Gorilla Khan. It’ll be set primarily in Hollywood(land) of the time period, along with some fun pulpy stuff thrown in.

And if Evil Hat reaches its stretch goal of $30K, Stephen Blackmoore, the author of the zombie noir City of the Lost, is going to write KHAN OF MARS. I know.

You can read more about the supporter levels and what pledges get you what swag right here in Update #6. A $10 dollar pledge gets you ebooks for all the novels, but for physical books you should read through the various tiers. You can also see artwork, get cool wallpapers of dudes with jet packs shooting pteranodons, etc, etc. Did I mention that the Kickstarter is already above $22K as I write this? Fewer than three thousand dollars in pledges will get this sucker going.

Anyway, I still haven’t settled on a title for intelligent ape in Hollywood novel. KING KHAN? PROFESSOR KHAN TAKES HOLLYWOOD? I dunno. Maybe, after I finish A BLESSING OF MONSTERS and start working on this, I’ll hold a contest.

I know I’m not one to be all rah rah about the projects I’m working on, but this one is definitely exciting.

The cover for Don’t Read This Book is here

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DRTBCover

Creepy, isn’t it?

If you guys don’t know, the book is an anthology set in the universe of the DON’T REST YOUR HEAD role-playing game. It’s a game in which people fall into a gothic nightmare world where they have limited abilities to control things (like lucid dreams) but the awful things they face are just way, way out there.

My story is called “Don’t Chew Your Food,” about a Food Network TV chef searching for a truth he doesn’t want to find. It was challenging as hell to write, but I really enjoyed it.

Anyway: Cover art! The book will be coming out in a few months, and I’ll be sure to announce it when it does.

“A Whip To Beat Us With”

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Cory Doctorow is smart about DRM.

I really do have to prioritize my own web store. I was happy to sell DRM-free copies of my prequel, and I need to get that working again.

More Tales of the Emerald Serpent Teasers

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Last Thursday I posted a snippet of the story I sold to Tales of the Emerald Serpent, a mosaic anthology currently on Kickstarter.

Well, novelist Juliet McKenna has posted a snippet of her own along with a bit of world-building on her blog.

Lynn Flewelling has done the same thing.

There’s also artwork and additional world-building material in the updates section of the Kickstarter.

Check them out, if you’re interested.

Teaser for Tales of the Emerald Serpent

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As I mentioned a few days ago, I have a story in a mosaic anthology called Tales of the Emerald Serpent, which is having a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to pay for the printing (my understanding is that it will have quite a bit of artwork in it).

There are other authors involved: Lynn Flewelling, Juliet McKenna, Martha Wells, and Julie Czerneda to name just a few, and you can see some of the artwork at the Kickstarter site or the publisher’s Facebook page.

My own modest contribution is a short story called “The One Thing You Can Never Trust.” For folks who are interested, I thought I’d post the first couple of pages of my story. If you like it and want to read the rest, along with the stories from these other excellent authors, please consider pledging. The way Kickstarter works, you pledge whatever amount you want (larger pledges bring more/fancier swag) but if the project doesn’t meet its target, no money will be collected at all.

So! Without further blather, here’s the opening to my story. I hope you like it.

THE ONE THING YOU CAN NEVER TRUST

by Harry Connolly

Emil Lacosta did not expect his new prices to please Mama Serene, but he did not expect her to actually swear at him. She did. Being Mama Serene, she did it startlingly well. “I am terribly sorry,” he said, carefully keeping his voice mild. “Acquiring the materials I require has become quite difficult and…”

“Spare me the apologies of a Zimbolay scholar,” she interrupted. “Every learned word makes my purse lighter.” She wrote out a bank note, signed it, and handed it to him. It was for the old price. “Next time, I will pay your new, even more outrageous, fee.”

Emil nodded and handed the note to Mariella. He turned to the three young consorts sitting on Mama Serene’s ornate couch. “Do you accept this spell without coercion, of your own will?”

The consorts said “Yes,” in deeply bored tones. One of them added: “because it’s making me rich!” They all laughed at him. He had asked them last time, too, and would ask next time. It didn’t matter if they thought him fussy. He held out a small vial to the first consort and, after she had spit into the golden liquid, allowed her to take it. He did the same for the others.

They were love potions all. A select few of Mama Serene’s clients paid a high premium to be genuinely (or at least magically) adored, even if it was just for a few days.

Their business concluded, Emil and Mama Serene nodded politely to each other. Mariella opened the office door and led Emil swiftly and quietly down the side stair and through the lounge. Emil hated coming to the House of the Silk Purse, hated delivering his product in person, hated knowing the consorts would drink the potion when he was not there to watch over them. But the money was good. Very, very good. With luck, he–

Two men rose out of their chairs and moved toward him. They seemed to have been waiting for him, and Emil stopped immediately and drew back. Mariella stepped around him, her hand on the ribbon tying down her sword. There was an odd expression on her face.

“No no!” the taller man said, his empty hands raised. “We mean only to talk.” Continue reading

Tales of the Emerald Serpent

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As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ve written a story for a shared-world mosaic anthology which is being funded via Kickstarter. The title is Tales of the Emerald Serpent and the title of my story is “The One Thing You Can Never Trust.”

This has nothing to do with Twenty Palaces; it’s a high fantasy co-created by editor R. Scott Taylor with writers like Julie Czerneda, Lynn Flewelling, Martha Wells, Robert Mancebo, and Juliet McKenna, along with artists like Todd Lockwood.

You can read more at the site above. Check it out.