Progress.
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Hey, is HBO premiering a new show tonight?
StandardI think I might have heard something about it.
Randomness for 4/15
Standard1) Breaking it down.
2) The Pierley/Redford Disassociative Affect Diagnostic. About as accurate as any internet personality test, but this one’s actually cool to take (and only 20 “questions”).
3) The Amazing Media Habits Of 8-18 Year Olds
4) Seven basic things this Cracked.com writer thinks you’re doing all wrong, for certain values of “you.” The only one my household didn’t know about was the brushing after meals thing.
5) Borders execs try to justify bonuses on the revenue their company will bring in someday after they get this little bankruptcy thing straightened out. God forbid their bonuses should reflect what they’ve already done, rather than what they expect to do.
6) Book reviewers, let me point out a thing that is not cool.
7) This is simply wonderful. Play with it when you can listen to sound on your computer.
Fun with Bookscan
StandardDid you know that Amazon.com lets authors look at the Bookscan numbers for their books? Of course you did. Did you know that Bookscan, which shows a fair portion of an author’s sales, doesn’t show them all? Probably.
But it’s still fun to look, right? Especially if you’re on deadline and have a massive amount of writing to do, and even less time than usual to do it.
Anyway, for quite a while the sales of Game of Cages and Child of Fire were going along at a steady pace. The numbers weren’t fantastic; HBO isn’t going to dump that Martin guy’s show for something made from mine, but it was steady and–best of all–not declining.
Then I did that guest stint at Charles Stross’s blog and those Bookscan numbers really jumped… for the length of time I was blogging there. After, they sloped back down.
But lately they’ve risen again, fairly steadily. I mean, the numbers are much nicer than before.
And I have no idea why. Am I being hilarious on Twitter? (all the spambots following me think so) This blog isn’t getting significantly more hits, and Google Alerts isn’t pointing me at any new reviews.
Which just goes to demonstrate that it’s true that authors don’t have a lot of control over books sale. Guest blogging did pretty well for me. This second surge? No clue. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with me or anything I’m doing.
That last hypothetical? That one stung a little
StandardMaybe it’s completely dorky of me, but I haven’t replied to any of the responses to my question about the magic jewel that would change your personality because frankly, I found it to be a little upsetting. Okay, that’s absolutely a dorky thing, but while it seemed interesting however many weeks ago I wrote it and scheduled it, when I started seeing responses (blog, LiveJournal) I got these weird… I don’t know… pangs.
I, too, would like to never forget anything I don’t want to forget! (my poor wife). I would also like to eat only when I’m hungry. I hate my own procrastination so much. That led to other things that weren’t mentioned in comments, like being wildly bored by exercise and cleaning. And so on. It was like a sudden tide of self-recrimination–which is usually fine for me, but I really wasn’t expecting it.
So of course I went to my wife. If I’m going to consider changing one major aspect of my personality, I’m going to check in with her. She may, er, have her own ideas about things I should change.
After joking that it was so hard to choose just one (har har) she settled on an umbrella change that she thought would address most of them: being disorganized. She’d want me to be more organized, not just about my living space or my cooking, but also with my time (and apartment clutter, too, I’m sure). I’m not sure how to phrase that in the context of the hypothetical, but there you go.
I think I’m going to leave self-improvement out of these for a while.
I’m not talking about that thing I want to talk about
StandardNot because it’s a secret, but because it’s not the sort of thing writers talk about online, and it’s faintly ridiculous to be upset about it. Also: unseemly to feel neglected by people who are friendly enough but do not owe me anything.
So I’m going to talk about ebooks instead. Lots of people talk about the disadvantages of ebooks: you can’t loan them (usually, right?), can’t resell them, they feel ephemeral, some systems don’t even let you own it outright.
But many people obviously prefer them over physical books–they certainly rhapsodize about them online. You’d think that, with readers switching in large numbers, they’d be willing to pay more for those features.
I know I know. Ebook readers have all sorts of justifications for why they think they should be paying less. I just listed a bunch two paragraphs above. Still, it’s about demand, right? What price people will pay?
This jumped out at me while reading this article. The author starts with the assumption that all these features should lead to higher price points, which is very much the opposite of the usual set of assumptions I’ve found so far.
Anyway, it’s not going to happen right away, not while readers are agitating for price reductions. At some point, though, I suspect the price of ebooks will split off from the price of paper books, and ebooks will either cost the same as they do now (or increase slightly in price) but include ads or will come with upgradeable options that cost a little extra. (“Is the plottable map in the new Rothfuss worth an extra 99 cents?”)
End obligatory useless ebook prophecy.
Hypothetically
StandardAnother favor! Your habit of performing minor kindnesses (offering directions to a bowling alley, maybe) benefits yet another extra-dimensional sorcerer. Surprise! This time the sorcerer gives you a special stone that will change you in a very specific way.
The grateful sorcerer informs you that all you have to do is close you eyes and say “I wish that, for the rest of my life, I will never…” and then say a single thing you will never do, or never do again. It must be something you do with your mind: an emotion, an addiction, a thought, a memory, etc. You can’t say “… will never die of a heart attack” or “will never have less than a million dollars in my bank account” because those things aren’t habits, thoughts, feelings.
You mention, politely, that there is a long storytelling tradition in our world in which magical gifts such as this one always operate in such a way to harm the person using it in an unexpected way. The sorcerer laughs at this in a startled way, as though you’ve said something scandalous, then assures you that such a person would be an infamous criminal back home, and then assures you that there is nothing sneaky or underhanded about this gift. It will perform as described.
The sorcerer vanishes (to go bowling, I’m sure) leaving you with the stone. You have a chance to rid yourself, for the remainder of your life, of a particular mental quirk. Would you make the wish? What would the wish be?
The Steampunk(ed) Nerf gun
StandardFor some reason known only to the elves that live inside his brain, my son recently decided that he wanted to paint one of his Nerf guns to be “Steampunk”. Where that came from, I don’t know. He’s never read a steampunk novel as far as I can tell, and… Well, let’s just leave that at “mysterious.”
And being our son, we said “Annoying project? Sure!”
We forgot to take a picture of the Nerf Maverick in its unmodified form, but here it is, courtesy of the cool website Think Geek–behind the cut: Continue reading
A quick note about Twenty Palaces books
StandardFor a while I’ve been working on a project I haven’t wanted to be specific about, but what the hell. The deal is, I’ve been revising the Twenty Palaces prequel (cleverly titled Twenty Palaces) in the hopes of…
Actually, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. When I review what’s coming up this summer, I don’t really see a window when I could release it independently (unless I was intent on messing up Del Rey’s plans for the summer–more on that later). Maybe this fall?
Anyway, I’ve been working like crazy on the book, cleaning it up and fixing the story. The scene where Ray creates the ghost knife! His first meeting with Annalise! What exactly he did that made her hate him sooooo much!
It’s been fun, and it’s been instructional to see how screwed up this book really is. Sorry, everyone I ever queried about this! At some point, I’ll have to write a new story of how I got an agent and landed my contract, because now that I’ve seen the book that didn’t sell, I know I’ve been telling the story all wrong.
Randomness for 4/10
Standard1) Slow motion photography. Exploding cakes. Techno. I promise you that you will love this: Video. And it even comes with little stories! via @ChuckWendig
2) “I like big butts and I cannot lie, but is there some evolutionary reason as to why?” Sir Mix-A-Lot mashed with the modern just-so stories of sexual selection pressures. The comments are stone hilarious.
3) The sounds of Minecraft, as music. Video.
4) New Zealand brewer markets a “breakfast beer.” I’m not opposed to the idea of a (small) beer at breakfast, but this sounds god-awful.
5) “How I got a blank book onto the Amazon.com bestseller list.” via @victoriastrauss
6) Some posts on the resurgence of “epic” fantasy: One. Two.
7) Alternate Star Wars. What if George Lucas had been inspired by a Kurosawa film other than HIDDEN FORTRESS?