Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Bestselling Author Lynn Viehl posts another statement
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Over at Genreality, Lynn Viehl has posted another royalty statement for her top-20 New York Times bestseller, Twilight Fall. Well worth a look if you’re planning to sell fiction to a traditional publisher. To date, she’s received a $50,000 advance, but no royalties.
Bookbuying Again
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
First, here’s a link to a nice online used bookstore I came across:
It’s the kind of a place where the way to find interesting books is to browse their collection to see what they have that interests you, rather than searching for books you’ve heard about.
Second:
It’s happened. I’ve reached the point where I can’t shelve any new books unless I get rid of existing books. Since what I’ve got is old favorite fiction and my research library, there’s not much I can bear to part with. Which pretty much means I have to stop buying until the publishing industry quits trying to palm off DRM-infested ebooks. It’s Gutenberg, the library, and the occasional open-format ebook for me.
There are a couple of series I’m reading, and I’ll buy the final books in the series. But I can’t start any new ones.
Drat.
Free Agent: Jeremy Duns’ Spy Novel
Friday, August 21st, 2009
I’ve just read Free Agent, Jeremy Duns’ debut novel. I recommend it to fans of John Le Carré, Graham Greene, and Len Deighton.
I’m familiar with spy stories of two different stripes. In the first sort, there may be moral difficulties, but fundamentally we’re rooting for a hero. The second sort — exemplified most conspicuously by Le Carré and Greene — gives us a morally bleak environment where the characters have long since lost any idealism they might have had, where pragmatism rules the day. Free Agent is more the second of story.
It differs from Le Carré and Greene in two important respects. First, it’s fast-paced — more like the typical Deighton book, in pacing. Second, it has some darned good plot twists — it’s twistier than the aforementioned authors’ books tend to be. I prefer Duns’ writing, overall.
Here’s a link to the all-important writing sample.
The author tells me that his second book, Free Country, will come out next year. I’m anticipating it with interest.
Kessman’s Tales of Tanglewood
Saturday, June 13th, 2009
Last night I read Scott Kessman’s The Tales of Tanglewood: The Lon Dubh Whistle. It’s a fantasy that would be suitable for children, although I see no reason to leave them alone with all the fun stuff.
I like the web page, too. I think it does a good job of conveying the flavor of the book without taking too long to load.
The website material includes the all-important long excerpt, which is better than my attempting to tell you about the writing without giving away too much of the story.
If you’ve ever watched twilight come to the edge of the forest and found it enchanted, this book might strike your fancy. I’m eagerly expecting a sequel.
To Seek Out Strange New Books
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
In previous posts tagged ‘buying books,’ I discussed why I’ve been buying fewer books even though nothing beats a good read. I’ve already started a project to see if I can find a better way to buy — if I can recover the ability to locate fiction I like at a price I can afford.
(I don’t have a problem buying nonfiction. That’s much easier than it used to be. If a book has been published on a subject I’m interested in, all I have to do is afford it and shelve it. Since Amazon’s database came online, I’ve bought cartloads of nonfiction I scarcely ever would have seen on bookstore shelves.)
This isn’t the first time I’ve gone looking for another way to buy fiction. Some years ago, when the hype about ebooks was fairly new, I started looking around to buy some. I tried a few and stopped, for two reasons:
- Ebook publishers’ sites were not designed for efficient browsing; they tended to be intolerable on dialup.
- The editing was bad. I came across too much writing that was awkward at best.
I have broadband now, which ought to go some way toward mitigating the first problem, though it may well not eliminate it. As for the editing … within the fortnight, I found myself reading a novel from a New York publisher in which a character who wasn’t otherwise supposed to be an ignoramus used the word ’smited.’ After such a fine example of goodly writed English, I’m not sure there’s as much distance between New York publishing and indie ebook publishing as there used to be.
My method of buying, over the last couple of years, has mostly been to throw darts at Amazon. I take about fifty dollars and buy quasi-random works of fiction by authors I don’t know in genres I don’t hate. Over the last couple of years, I found new authors to read this way. I can’t say I did well this year: I’ve spent half my fifty and, while I didn’t hate all of the books, I didn’t come up with any keepers, either. So I’m going to see what else I can try.
Bring Back the Editors!
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
If I think only part of my increasingly inept fiction-buying in recent years is due to my becoming jaded and less tolerant as a reader, what accounts for the rest?
I don’t know. But I have my suspicions. I think the emphasis on sales, sales, sales! that’s overtaken the publishing industry has something to do with it.
In a recent post, Pat Holt writes about the decline of editorial power in the publishing industry. Note the time frame. Editors are just beginning to lose their literary clout midway through the period of my satisfactory fiction-buying.
If I don’t like a writer’s basic style, no amount of editing is likely to fix that. But some of the things that have caused me to put down recently-purchased books rather than finishing them aren’t pervasive. They’re the kind of intermittent awkwardness good editing is likely to catch.
For instance, in a suspense novel I bought recently, the author gives one of the characters a distinctive speech pattern. It’s all right to a point — but it’s overdone: at length it becomes a distracting and exasperating tic. A bit of blue penciling could have fixed this.
In the same book, on one occasion the author has another character draw a gun on the main character, apparently because she did something risky without backup. At that point my suspension of disbelief went sproing! for a couple of reasons. First, the characters are supposed to be truly dangerous people; and the truly dangerous people of my acquaintance don’t have a habit of making idle threats to each other: the threat might, after all, be taken seriously by someone whose reaction could be deadly. Then, imagine the threat was not idle — suppose the other character was prepared the shoot the heroine because she hadn’t taken proper care for her own safety. The illogic is stunning, and doesn’t accord well with the previous portrayal of the threatening character, who seems to be sane and competent otherwise.
I wouldn’t expect all that many people to balk at the scene for my first reason; but the second seems likely to be a more common reaction, and I wouldn’t be surprised if an editor who had time to edit flagged that scene for revision. Fix this stuff that eventually jerked me out of the story, and I’d have been happy with this book, and I might have bought more of the author’s work.
I’m not saying the author is a bad writer. Anybody who writes knows how hard it can be to see your own work clearly, at times. You’re too close to it. Even good writers can benefit greatly from editing or critique.
Then there’s the cookie-cutter approach to fiction. The idea seemingly is to duplicate the success of one bestseller by publishing other books that feel a lot like it.
There are genres where repetitious plot structure doesn’t bother me. I read mysteries, and one mystery plot has much the same shape as the next: surprise in the overall pattern of events isn’t an element of the genre. The interest of a mystery as an individual work lies elsewhere.
But in thriller/suspense novels, surprise at the way events unfold is an essential element in my enjoyment. That I read and liked Trendsetting Bestseller doesn’t imply that I want to read twenty-five more novels in which the heroine is menaced in much the same way by much the same kind of psychopath, with much the same pattern of threat build-up, with the obligatory narrow escape from death at the end, and with the obligatory intertwined love story. The drive to make every book as commercial as the last is giving too many books too similar a flavor.
Because of this, I’m starting a project: I’m looking for better ways to buy fiction. My old practices used to get me books I liked, but they haven’t worked well for years.
I’m missing the fun of often sitting down with a good book.
Buy Two, Get One Wrong
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
I used to be good at buying books. Back in the days when the real price of books was half what it is now, I got to go bookshopping when my mother decided to visit the nearest Waldenbooks, or any of the late, lamented independent bookstores in Worcester, Massachusetts. In those days, I overwhelmingly bought mass market fiction. I didn’t have much money.
I almost always came back with books I liked. Every once in a while, I’d pick up an author whose work didn’t grab me after I started reading, but I chose successfully so often in my limited shopping time that we can discount my disappointments. Through the years 1975 – 1985, I loved shopping at bookstores. I’d go out, and come back with treasure.
I bought plenty of books throughout the rest of the last millennium, but the percentage of fiction dropped off sharply. I was buying nonfiction hardcovers and trade paperbacks for research. I was still interested in buying fiction, but …
I’d go into the bookstores and browse the same way I’d always browsed. I’d look at the cover, read the back cover copy, read the opening, and maybe read a couple of pages at random. I’d buy the books that looked interesting.
And when I got home, I’d have a noticeable number of duds. Stories that, for some reason, I didn’t enjoy after all, even though they looked promising.
The ratio of duds slowly kept creeping up. One book in four. Then one book in three. Then one book in two.
“The books haven’t changed. You’re jaded,” some of you will say. “Almost everything was new when you were 12. At 45, you’ve probably read every plot in your favored genres at least once.”
Partly true. Yeah, there are books that grabbed me when I was young that don’t do it now because I’ve outgrown them. There are also books that might have grabbed me then that leave me indifferent now: there’s nothing in their openings to distinguish them from the last two dozen coming-of-age fantasy trilogies, and my attention starts to wander.
But I don’t think that’s the whole story.
Some of my old favorite books, I read to death. I really enjoyed them on the second, third, and fourth readings; by the eleventh, the needle’s worn the groove too deep. They cannot regain the quality of surprisingness for me any time soon.
But there were other old favorites that I neglected for decades, and only picked up again recently — to discover that I like them as well as ever. The Sherlock Holmes stories prove just as engaging last year as they were thirty years ago, when I discovered the books at my grandmother’s house.
And, if there are books that I’ve left behind, there are other books that I’ve come to appreciate. The first time I picked up the The Silmarillion on its initial publication, I didn’t finish it. Some years later, I tried it again; and I’ve since happily read it five times.
Or: I’ve outworn some of my interests, but I’ve developed new ones. Shouldn’t I be able to find reading to accommodate my present interests?
Well, I can — sort of. The problem isn’t that I can’t do it at all, but that I can’t seem to do it efficiently. If I buy enough fiction, yes, I’m sure to come back with some I like in the mix.
At my present rate 50% success rate, it costs me $18 to buy a novel I like: I’ll buy two at $9 and be wrong about one.
That means, for me, the real price of a good work of fiction has almost quadrupled. To buy a new work of fiction that I’ll end up liking costs 2.75 minimum wage hours in practice.
That the enormous practical price increase hurts my bookbuying tremendously should surprise nobody.
But there’s something else.
I don’t know where the nearest bookstore is. The fundamental reason I don’t know is that I now have bad, not good, associations, with bookshopping.
Exactly how many times can I go into a bookstore and come out with $60 of books, only to find out that I wish I’d only spent $30 because I don’t like half of them, before the sight of a 1990s or 2000s book cover raises — not anticipation of an exciting story — but a sense of vague depression, because I anticipate getting stung?
I don’t know. I know I’ve passed that number of times.
I don’t know why I no longer can identify a book I’ll like by browsing. But it means I don’t have much more use for physical bookstores that sell new books, because I can come out with 50% success buying anything that looks vaguely interesting at Amazon.
Sure, there’s fiction being published I want to read. But I can’t find it reliably now.
The Real Price of Books
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
The year I worked my first job, minimum wage was $2.90/hr. The price of a larger mass market paperbacks was $2. A book cost 0.69 hrs.
Today minimum wage is $6.55/hr, and a mass market paperback costs $9. A book costs 1.37 hrs.
Or: the effective price of books has risen by 98.5%. It takes almost twice as many hours, at gross minimum wage, to buy a book now. All else being equal, you’d expect it to cut my book-buying about it half.
All else hasn’t been equal.
Why I’m Not Buying Many Books
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
My book-buying has drastically diminished in recent years.
This is hardly an ideal state of affairs. Nothing beats a good book. But these days, I have three problems:
- Lack of shelf space.
- Lack of money.
- In recent years, I’ve bought too many books I didn’t enjoy, which has curbed my enthusiasm.
I have eight bookshelves, but probably 95% of the space is spoken for. The books that are on the shelf now are overwhelmingly either old favorite fiction, or my research library.
I’m not quite at the point where, in order to shelve a new book, I have to get rid of an old favorite. But I’m close to it. Every new book I think of buying is competing with my old favorites for shelf space.
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun made the cut. Obviously, I like epic poetry: I write the stuff. Obviously, I have some interest in the Volsunga Saga: I’ve transcribed and am uploading William Morris’ Sigurd the Volsung. And The Lord of the Rings are my favorite books of all time. I’ll make room for a Tolkien epic poem.
However, I did not buy C.C. Finlay’s new fantasy trilogy. I read the first book and liked it well enough so that, if I had space, I’d probably buy all three. But I’m short space, and until I can buy them as acceptably formatted, acceptably priced ebooks, I probably won’t.
An acceptably formatted ebook is an an open, reflowable format without DRM. An acceptably priced ebook costs no more than a mass market paperback. I have infinite room for these — if the publishers would sell them to me.
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