Boosting the Signal: Asylum, by Various Authors, Post No. 1

Normally I run Boosting the Signal posts on Fridays when I have them to run. But since I’m a member of NIWA, and NIWA does a yearly anthology, I’m running a special feature week to highlight the 2015 NIWA anthology! It’s called Asylum, and features stories by both NIWA and non-NIWA authors, all along the theme of the anthology title. Today’s Boosting the Signal post features a piece from Jeffrey Cook and Katherine Perkins to highlight their story “Bedlam Asylum”. Of this story, Jeffrey says that it’s set one month after their novel Foul is Fair, and it’s a strategic analysis of the emotional needs of disabled pixie Ashling. And as you might guess, Ashling’s goal is pretty much what the anthology says on the tin: asylum.

Asylum

Humans mistake pixies for butterflies and sprites for moths. Pixies travel and work in glimmers; sprites, in murmurs.

Pixie magic focuses on locations, and sprite magic focuses on events, but the important thing is that it’s always done together.

Ashling’s wings were torn years ago. She relies on a service crow just to fly at all. Her glimmer left her behind a long time ago. She’s worked mostly alone with her crow, or with people fifty times her size. She says she’s fine. She’s lying. Who knows if her friends can tell, but any pixie or sprite could.

An outcast sprite and an outcast pixie will understand each other in ways a half-human sidhe princess and a half-menehune will never fathom, no matter how good of friends they all are.

But Ashling is friends with the princess. The princess whose little clique in Seattle is safely off-limits from Faerie conflict for the rest of the season.

Ashling needs not to be alone anymore, and that’s all the ‘in’ a sprite looking to be granted asylum could ask for.

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Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Barnes and Noble is not filling me with confidence

Over on Dear Author this morning, on their morning news roundup post, I spotted this New York Times article about the new CEO of Barnes and Noble and what his goals are for the chain. There are two general points of interest for me in this article, both of which make me look askance at B&N’s entire modus operandi these days.

First one:

To that end, Mr. Boire is leading a push to rebrand Barnes & Noble as more than just a bookstore by expanding its offerings of toys, games, gadgets and other gifts and reshaping the nation’s largest bookstore chain into a “lifestyle brand.”

As one of Dear Author’s commenters pointed out, exactly whose lifestyle is B&N aiming to represent here? Do they have anything more specific in mind there than “people who are actually willing to set foot in our stores and give us money”? Because I certainly haven’t seen much in the way of actual focus here.

And the other bit I want to call out:

Still, the company’s struggles are probably far from over. Barnes & Noble has been battered by Amazon, its powerful online rival, and has incurred big financial losses from its largely failed attempt to carve out territory in the e-book space with the Nook. While the company posted lower losses in its Nook division in the most recent quarter, sales were still disappointing, as the Nook segment tumbled 31.9 percent to $43.5 million, primarily because of lower digital content sales.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: look, B&N, your ebook sales might not have tanked if you hadn’t unilaterally screwed up the entire experience of buying ebooks on your site when you overhauled it this past summer. I haven’t bought a single ebook from B&N since that site update. It is directly responsible for me shifting the majority of my ebook purchases over to Kobo, with a side helping of Smashwords and Amazon for indie authors.

In other words, if you make it teeth-grindingly impossible for customers to buy digital content on your site, you know what’s going to happen? They’re not going to buy digital content from you.

The Digital Reader had some recent B&N news too. And what made me raise my eyebrows there was that apparently, B&N is now selling pasta. Pasta. Seriously?

Because, as one of the Digital Reader’s commenters pointed out, when I want to buy pasta, I think B&N!

If you need me, I’ll be over here facepalming.

And, for that matter, buying all my future print book purchases at Third Place Books.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.