Ordinary Day

First up, if you like the Jane Austen mashups that’ve been coming out lately, then you’ll probably want to take a look at this! I quite liked Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, so today I finally went down to Third Place Books and ordered me a copy of Mansfield Park and Mummies, by norilana. It’s only available via online purchase or by ordering, so if this sounds like something you’d giggle over, think about ordering your own copy. Vera Nazarian will be very grateful. You can get more details over here.

And while we’re on the topic of authors who need some love, mdhenry’s Amanda Feral series is under threat of nixing due to its sales numbers! If you love you some zombies with a heaping helping of snark, you should get the mass market release of Happy Hour of the Damned, or the forthcoming trade paperback of Battle of the Network Zombies. Click here to Mark’s site for more details.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

I spent most of this weekend at the filk convention Conflikt, and that was great fun, but even as a bunch of geeky music was going on I kept an eye on the kerfuffle that exploded between Amazon and Macmillan. The issue at hand appears to be the pricing of ebooks, and as an ebook author, this is of course Relevant to My Interests.

The issue as I understand it is that Amazon and Macmillan are having a huge dispute about how much ebooks ought to cost. Macmillan is aiming for a variable pricing structure from $14.99 down to as low as $5.99, whereas Amazon is standing adamant about $9.99 as a price point. (Side note: since a lot of the ebooks I buy tend to run lower than even $9.99, even when purchased on Amazon, the nuances of the ebook pricing structure are still a mystery to me. But I digress.) They couldn’t reach an agreement, and so Amazon up and pulled all Macmillan titles out of its database, not only the ebooks, but the print titles as well.

To wit, whoa.

Amazon has since capitulated but as of this morning, Macmillan authors are still reporting that new copies of their works are still not available for purchase on Amazon. And the agents I’m seeing chime in on the matter are pretty sure this isn’t over yet by a long shot. I’m still thinking hard about what I want to do about this, if anything. I’ve seen a lot of people asserting that this has been the last straw for them, and that they will cease doing any further business with Amazon; I’ve seen several authors now go and pull all links to Amazon’s pages for their works off their sites.

It’s just one great big mess, and I’m hoping it’ll settle itself out soon. ‘Cause again, Relevant to My Interests. Drollerie is tiny enough that I can’t exactly tell people not to buy Faerie Blood or Defiance on Amazon, if that’s where they want to buy it–especially given that neither of these titles have shown up on Barnes and Noble’s site yet, and Fictionwise doesn’t have Defiance, either. But man, it’s making me inclined more and more just to point folks directly at Drollerie’s own store. Where we don’t have any DRM anyway!

Link roundup, for those of you who want to see more on the matter:

• Agent Nathan Bransford has a good summation here
• John Scalzi is less than pleased
• Tobias Buckell goes into the differences between what print books cost and what ebooks cost, which is good reading if you want a handle on why ebooks might not necessarily be as cheap as you think they should be
• Charles Stross is also less than pleased, but attempts to provide an outsider’s guide to the fight
• And agent Kristin Nelson does a quick overview of what exactly Amazon and Macmillan have themselves said on the matter
• ETA: Agent Jennifer Jackson chimes in with her own link roundup and reactions
• ETA: And a kerfuffle of this magnitude just wouldn’t be complete without a word (or many!) from Fandom Wank!
• ETA: Scott Westerfeld has a good summation, and I think that by and large I agree with his analysis
• ETA: An interesting counterargument suggests that even if Amazon is the one who had to capitulate here, they’re still going to win this fight

Again, whoa. This is me over here in the corner, munching popcorn and waiting to see how this all plays out.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Now I know several of you likely to be reading this are writers, either already published or aspiring to get that way. Among you, I know that several are specifically involved with the romance genre or the urban fantasy/paranormal romance genre. So you’re probably already aware of the huge debacle that’s exploded across the publishing blogs the last couple of days about Harlequin opening up a shiny new vanity publishing imprint.

I posted earlier this week about another new Harlequin venture, Carina Press. Which I thought was pretty awesome. Harlequin’s new vanity imprint? Not so much.

Here are a whole bunch of links expounding on the brouhaha:

• Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware (which you should be reading if you’re not already) gives an overview of the situation and why it’s of deep concern
• Pub Rants, the blog of agent Kristin Nelson, brings the news of the Romance Writers of America issuing a very strong statement against this, and what they’re going to do about it
• Making Light chimes in with news of the RWA statement and much discussion in the comments
• Smart Bitches Trashy Books addresses the issue, and a whole heckuva lot of heat about self-publishing vs. vanity publishing can be found in the comments
• Author Jackie Kessler does a breakdown of the concept of Harlequin Horizons and explains exactly why the various stunts they’re trying to pull are bad
• Writer Beware posts a statement in from the Mystery Writers of America, also strongly against this development
• Kristin Nelson breaks the news that Harlequin is now backpedaling on the “Harlequin Horizons” brand name on the imprint but no word yet about whether further retractions will occur
• Most relevant to my interests as an SF/F author, SFWA weighs in with a very, very strong statement of their own
• Inevitably, Fandom Wank has put up a post since there’s some sideshow wankery involved, featuring a flamewar in the abovementioned SB thread, and a very snarky article from the New Yorker

My take on the matter? Well, initially I was going to say that I didn’t really have a horse in this race, since I’m an SF/F author, not a romance author–but solarbird pointed out and quite correctly that actually, any writer of fiction has a horse in this race. The reason for this is that if Harlequin actually pulls off doing this imprint of theirs, it’s highly likely that other big NY-based publishers will follow suit. As Writer Beware calls out, a couple already have, although they’ve apparently taken pains to be less obvious about it in their branding.

And, the big sticking point for me is that according to the spin that was going around the Smart Bitches thread from a Harlequin rep, they will be including in standard rejection letters an upsell to the vanity imprint. Which essentially means that an author who comes to Harlequin via traditional publishing routes and who gets rejected would be getting told “we don’t think your book is good enough to be a Real Book, but if you pay us enough money, we’ll humor you and print it anyway!”

This goes against the unshakeable law of writing: money flows to the author. Always.

So yeah, this is huge and the furor is still ongoing. I’ll be very, very interested to see what Harlequin does now that they have not one, not two, but three professional writers’ organizations angry with them.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.